Researchers unlock cheap way to vaporize plastic and use it to make more plastic | The breakthrough enables a circular economy where plastic doesn’t end up sitting in landfills

From the article: WHY IT MATTERS: All that packaging we’ve treated as disposable may finally be reborn. Researchers have cracked the code for turning plastic back into the building blocks to make new plastics. It could revolutionize recycling, which studies have shown is broken.

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.

This is great, except we’re now finding it throughout our bodies. We really need to replace it with organic versions pronto.

the question should not be “is it possible”, but “is it cheaper than the established process”.

but of course, small steps.

Micro and nano plastics are still a problem. We need to end how plastic is currently made and switch it to material that is compostable or more compatible to biology.

This is going to be echoed over and over again by plastic companies whether it actually comes or not. Companies use plastic mostly because it’s a penny cheaper than reusable stuff and pushes costs onto others, so it’s gotta complete with virgin material costs. We can look into it, but if it doesn’t talk about reducing plastic use, it will always be met with skepticism.

This still relies on people to sort out their plastic.

The biggest challenge of recycling is sorting. A ton of mixed recyclables is worth less than a ton of flawlessly sorted recyclables. 

The other big darn deal is gathering the feedstock. If you burn a kg of fuel to get a kg of recyclables to the recycling factory, it is probably better to not recycling it.