Researchers from UC Berkeley have devised a clever trick for recycling difficult-to-recycle plastics that would otherwise be destined for landfills and poisoning the earth.
The process is called “isomerizing ethenolysis,” and it vaporizes these plastics into valuable gases—propylene and isobutylene—which can be used to make new plastic, potentially reducing the need for fossil fuels in plastic production.
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The new approach works especially well with polyethylene and polypropylene, the two dominant types of plastic waste. Those two plastics, one perfect for single-use plastic bags and another one for harder plastics like the kind they make luggage out of, are polymers that the researchers can revert into monomers so that they can be reused to make more polymers later.
The process involves the use of three different soluble catalysts. The explanations provided by various sources are all quite complicated, so I’m going to simplify them as easily and as stupidly as I can. These catalysts reduce plastics to a pathetic shell of its former self on a molecular level. They break down carbon chains in the polymers that provide the plastic its structure. They use sodium to break polymer chains and tungsten oxide on silica to break down propylene and isobutylene with nearly 90 percent efficiency.
Polyethylene and polypropylene account for around two-thirds of global plastic waste, so if this method can be scaled up significantly, it would have enormous implications for the environment. But that’s a big “if” because doing so would require a massive global investment in infrastructure development to accommodate all the new technologies and methodologies involved.
It’s promising, nevertheless, especially considering how traditional plastic recycling methods used in the past several decades are kind of sort of a myth and don’t work.
