New recycling method fights plastic waste
Turning mixed plastic into useful chemicals.
Almost 80% of plastic in the waste stream ends up in landfills or accumulates in the environment. Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists have developed a technology that converts a conventionally unrecyclable mixture of plastic waste into useful chemicals, presenting a new strategy in the toolkit to combat global plastic waste.
The technology, invented by ORNL’s Tomonori Saito and former postdoctoral researcher Md Arifuzzaman, uses an exceptionally efficient organocatalyst that allows selective deconstruction of various plastics, including a mixture of diverse consumer plastics. Arifuzzaman, now with Re-Du, is a current Innovation Crossroads fellow.
Production of chemicals from plastic waste requires less energy and releases fewer greenhouse gases than conventional petroleum-based production. Such a pathway provides a critical step toward a net-zero society, the scientists said.
“This concept offers highly efficient and low-carbon chemical recycling of plastics and presents a promising strategy toward establishing closed-loop circularity of plastics,” said Saito, corresponding author of the study published in Materials Horizons. – Lawrence Bernard
Journal: Materials Horizons
DOI: 10.1039/D3MH00801K
Media Contact
Emily R. Tomlin
DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory
tomliner@ornl.gov
Office: 8653412111
All latest news from the category: Materials Sciences
Materials management deals with the research, development, manufacturing and processing of raw and industrial materials. Key aspects here are biological and medical issues, which play an increasingly important role in this field.
innovations-report offers in-depth articles related to the development and application of materials and the structure and properties of new materials.
Newest articles
Detector for continuously monitoring toxic gases
The material could be made as a thin coating to analyze air quality in industrial or home settings over time. Most systems used to detect toxic gases in industrial or…
On the way for an active agent against hepatitis E
In order to infect an organ, viruses need the help of the host cells. “An effective approach is therefore to identify targets in the host that can be manipulated by…
A second chance for new antibiotic agent
Significant attempts 20 years ago… The study focused on the protein peptide deformylase (PDF). Involved in protein maturation processes in cells, PDF is essential for the survival of bacteria. However,…