A new process produces fuel quickly at mild temperature, with few byproducts. There are a lot of potentially useful raw materials bound up in used face masks, grocery bags, and food wrap. But it has been much cheaper to keep making more of these single-use plastics than to recover and recycle the
has cracked the code that stymied previous attempts to break down these persistent plastics. They reported their discovery in today’s issue of the journalTypically, recycling plastics requires ‘cracking’ or splitting apart the tough and stable bonds that also make them so persistent in the environment. This cracking step requires high temperatures, making it expensive and energy intensive.
Crucially in the current study, the alkylation reaction immediately follows the cracking step in a single reaction vessel, near room temperature . “Cracking just to break the bonds results in them forming another one in an uncontrolled way, and that’s a problem in other approaches,” said Oliver Y. Gutiérrez, a study author and chemist at PNNL. “The secret formula here is that when you break a bond in our system, you immediately make another one in a targeted way that gives you the end product you want. That is also the secret that enables this conversion at low temperature.
“The fact that industry has successfully deployed these emerging alkylation catalysts demonstrates their stable, robust nature,” said Johannes Lercher, a senior author of the study, director of PNNL’s Institute for Integrated Catalysis, and professor of chemistry at TUM. “This study points to a practical new solution to close the carbon cycle for waste plastic that is closer to implementation than many others being proposed.
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