The average US car now contains hundreds of kilograms of plastic that end up in landfill when the vehicle has outlived its use, but a new process could convert those waste plastics into graphene that can be used to create new car parts
at Rice University in Texas and his colleagues have previously found that plastic could be converted into graphene via a process called flash joule heating, where material is heated to temperatures generally in excess of 2700°C by passing high voltages through it.
Tour and his colleagues take plastic waste that has been ground down into particles around 1 millimetre in diameter. Their flash joule process turns any carbon present into graphene, while simultaneously vaporising any other elements, such as hydrogen, oxygen, chlorine or silica, that are present in the plastic waste. Tour says these could be captured and reused in future.
“We just take that mixture of engineering plastics and whatever else; there’ll be some polypropylene, some polyethylene, all mixed together. In less than 1 second, we convert it into graphene,” says Tour.He says the research shows that certain parts of cars could be recycled again and again, avoiding large amounts of landfill waste. The average US car contains between 200 and 350 kilograms of plastic, according to the research team.
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