New process vaporizes plastic bags and bottles, yielding gases to make new, recycled plastics
By Robert Sanders, UC Berkeley News.
Excerpt: A new chemical process can essentially vaporize plastics that dominate the waste stream today and turn them into hydrocarbon building blocks for new plastics. The catalytic process, developed at the University of California, Berkeley, works equally well with the two dominant types of post-consumer plastic waste: polyethylene, the component of most single-use plastic bags; and polypropylene, the stuff of hard plastics, from microwavable dishes to luggage. It also efficiently degrades a mix of these types of plastics. The process, if scaled up, could help bring about a circular economy for many throwaway plastics, with the plastic waste converted back into the monomers used to make polymers, thereby reducing the fossil fuels used to make new plastics. ...“We have an enormous amount of polyethylene and polypropylene in everyday objects, from lunch bags to laundry soap bottles to milk jugs ...,” said John Hartwig, a UC Berkeley professor of chemistry who led the research. ...Hartwig, graduate student Richard J. “RJ” Conk, chemical engineer Alexis Bell, who is a UC Berkeley Professor of the Graduate School, and their colleagues will publish the details of the catalytic process on Aug. 29 in the journal Science (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adq7316)....