Graduate student RJ Conk adjusts a reaction chamber in which mixed plastics are degraded into the reusable building blocks of new polymers. Photo by Robert Sanders, UC Berkeley.
A new chemical process was developed at the University of California, Berkeley that can essentially vaporize plastics that dominate the waste stream today and turn them into hydrocarbon building blocks for new plastics. The catalytic process 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.
The development of this new chemical process was led by the Hartwig Lab at the College of Chemistry and the underlying chemistry was primarily characterized using solution- and solid-state Nuclear Magnetic Resonance techniques at the PMRC Core. The results were published in the journal Science.