plastic waste tagged posts

Researchers have developed a solar-powered reactor to break down hard-to-recycle forms of plastic waste—such as drink bottles, nylon textiles and polyurethane foams—using acid recovered from old car batteries, and converting it into clean hydrogen fuel and valuable industrial chemicals. The results are reported in the journal Joule.

The reactor, developed by researchers from the University of Cambridge, is powered by the energy from the sun, and could be a cheaper, more su...

The rapid accumulation of plastic waste is currently posing significant risks for both human health and the environment on Earth. A possible solution to this problem would be to recycle plastic waste, breaking it into smaller molecules that can be used to produce valuable chemicals.

Researchers at Nanjing Forestry University and Tsinghua University recently introduced a new approach to convert polystyrene (PS), a plastic widely used to pack some foods and other products, into toluene, a hydrocarbon that is of value in industrial and manufacturing settings. Their proposed strategy, outlined in a paper published in Nature Nanotechnology, entails heating polystyrene waste in hydrogen and breaking it down into smaller vapor molecules, a process known as hydro-pyrolysis.

Life-cycle a...

Researchers have demonstrated how CO2 can be captured from industrial processes – or even directly from the air – and transformed into clean, sustainable fuels using just the energy from the Sun.

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, developed a solar-powered reactor that converts captured CO2 and plastic waste into sustainable fuels and other valuable chemical products. In tests, CO2 was converted into syngas, a key building block for sustainable liquid fuels, and plastic bottles were converted into glycolic acid, which is widely used in the cosmetics industry.

Unlike earlier tests of their solar fuels tec...

Chemists at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) have discovered a method that could turn plastic waste into valuable chemicals by using sunlight.

In lab experiments, the research team mixed plastics with their catalyst in a solvent, which allows the solution to harness light energy and convert the dissolved plastics into formic acid – a chemical used in fuel cells to produce electricity.

Reporting their work in Advanced Science, the team led by NTU Assistant Professor Soo Han Sen from the School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences made their catalyst from the affordable, biocomp...