From DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory 22/09/23
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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.
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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.
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“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