Scientists Say New System Can Recycle Plastic Indefinitely Without Degrading Its Quality

"It’s every chemical engineer’s dream. "

Fantastic Plastic

Plastic is really hard to recycle, despite repeated assurances from manufacturers that it's possible, and most of it just ends up in landfills. And the stuff that does get recycled decreases in quality during the process.

Figuring out a way to effectively recycle plastic without degrading its quality would be an extraordinary feat. And now, it seems that a group of scientists in Switzerland may have cracked the code using some clever chemistry.

In a new paper for the journal Nature Chemical Engineering, researchers at ETH Zurich detailed a process in which they break apart the chemical bonds in long polymer chains that make up plastic into smaller molecules.

These resulting molecules can serve as base ingredients for more products, such as jet fuel or more plastics, without losing quality.

"It’s every chemical engineer’s dream to have a formula like this at hand for their process," ETH Zurich professor of catalysis engineering and the study's principal investigator Javier Pérez-Ramírez said in a statement about the research.

Garbology

Plastic makes much of modern life possible, but it can also be pernicious — as vividly illustrated by the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — as it breaks down into ever-smaller pieces such as microplastics and nanoplastics.

These infinitesimal pieces of plastic are found everywhere, migrating into sediment not touched by humankind or even inside human brains and semen.

Many scientists think microplastic is even responsible for the increase in cancer rates among relatively young people due to the complex interplay between the molecules in our bodies and the chemicals that microplastics release.

The production of plastic, derived from fossil fuels, also contributes to greenhouse gas emissions that accelerate climate change.

So if this experiment from ETH Zurich becomes a viable commercial method, it could stand to address a huge range of ills.

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