Valuable chemicals are selectively produced from mixed plastic waste by an ORNL-developed plastic deconstruction process. Credit: Tomonori Saito, Md Arifuzzaman and Adam Malin, ORNL/U. S. Dept. of Energy
Blended plastics can be transformed into useful chemicals.
Almost 80% of plastic waste ultimately finds its method to land fills or remains in the environment. Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have actually pioneered a method that transforms traditionally unrecyclable mixtures of plastic waste into useful chemicals, providing a new approach in the fight versus around the world plastic contamination.
The innovation, created by ORNLs Tomonori Saito and former postdoctoral researcher Md Arifuzzaman, uses an incredibly efficient organocatalyst that enables selective deconstruction of numerous plastics, including a mix of varied customer plastics. Arifuzzaman, now with Re-Du, is a present Innovation Crossroads fellow.
Production of chemicals from plastic waste requires less energy and releases fewer greenhouse gases than traditional petroleum-based production. Such a pathway supplies an important step toward a net-zero society, the scientists stated.
” This idea provides extremely effective and low-carbon chemical recycling of plastics and provides a promising technique towards establishing closed-loop circularity of plastics,” said Saito, matching author of the study released in Materials Horizons.
Recommendation: “Selective deconstruction of blended plastics by a customized organocatalyst” by Md Arifuzzaman, Bobby G. Sumpter, Zoriana Demchuk, Changwoo Do, Mark A. Arnould, Md Anisur Rahman, Peng-Fei Cao, Ilja Popovs, Robert J. Davis, Sheng Dai and Tomonori Saito, 24 July 2023, Materials Horizons.DOI: 10.1039/ D3MH00801K.
