Scientists at UC Berkeley have developed a new chemical recycling process that allows for plastic creation to happen from scratch.A team of scientists from University of California, Berkeley, has developed a new method for breaking plastics down into their original building blocks. This could unlock a new highly-efficient recycling industry that produces valuable plastics and reduces the need to derive them from fossil fuels.
The problem isn’t going away any time soon and we are in dire need of more effective solutions. According to Hartwig and his team, it would be unwise to completely turn our back on“Plastics are fantastic materials,” Hartwig told IE. “They are much lighter than glass or metal but can have enough strength. They are more pliable than glass. One would not wrap food to preserve it in glass and ship and store the food in glass, for example. It even uses less energy and water to produce than paper.
In fact, some argue that the word ‘recycle’ is a misnomer, and the most widely used process should really be called ‘downcycling’. Bottles and supermarket goods, for example, are often turned into plastic trays and carpeting, and can’t be reused to create the same single-use products. “In the best-case scenario, polymer chains are broken to recreate the monomer from which the polymer was made,” Hartwig explained. “In our work, we found a way to cleave carbon-carbon bonds to form a single product that can be used to make new plastics. Thus, one can envision chemically recycling polyethylene and polypropylene to make the monomers from which new plastics with the original properties could be made.