I hate it when people chide me for throwing out my plastic instead of recycling it.
Don't they know that most [read: almost all] of it ends up in landfills anyway?
Most cities have ended their recycling programs because they're too expensive to maintain with too little return, especially after China stopped buying our recyclables.
From 2018:
However, UC Berkeley Professor of Chemistry John Hartwig might have solved the problem.
Hartwig and his team just invented a way to take every plastic back to its basic building blocks, so it can be used in the production of new plastic.
Researchers at UC Berkeley have developed a new catalytic process that can vaporize the polyethylene (single-use bags) and polypropylene (hard plastics) that dominate trash piles, converting them into propylene and other hydrocarbon gases. Those gases can then be used as feedstocks to manufacture virgin plastics again, enabling a truly circular economy.
'So much of what's around us is made of these polyolefins,' said UC Berkeley Professor of Chemistry John Hartwig, who led the study. 'What we can now do, in principle, is take those objects and bring them back to the starting monomer by chemical reactions we've devised that cleave the typically stable carbon-carbon bonds.'
The breakthrough is a big deal because polyethylene and polypropylene plastics account for almost two-thirds of global plastic waste. Around 80 percent of it ends up incinerated, put into landfills, or littered into the environment as microplastics, which eventually find their way into our bodies.
That's good news for all the men out there!
Here's how it works:
It's a little early to know how this will scale to mass recycling, but it's pretty amazing all the same.
Guess now I'll have to find a space in my house for those stupid green recycling tubs.
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