Chemical recycling method breaks down plastics into their original building blocks, potentially allowing them to be recycled repeatedly without losing quality.
Chemical recycling method breaks down plastics into their original building blocks, potentially allowing them to be recycled repeatedly without losing quality.
Around 45 per cent of plastic waste is recycled annually in the UK and is on the increase. However one of the problems with current plastic recycling methods is that you end up with a lower quality plastic with worse properties than the original. This means that plastic drinks bottles cannot simply be recycled into new drinks bottles continuously, but instead are used for other lower grade products such as water pipes, park benches and traffic cones.
Now scientists from the Universities of Bath and Birmingham have developed a new way of chemical recycling - converting plastics back into their constituent chemical molecules - so that they can be used to make new plastics of the same quality as the original.
The team’s method, published in ChemSusChem, uses lower temperatures and more environmentally-friendly catalysts than previous methods.
Read more at University of Bath
Photo Credit: Hans via Pixabay
