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Researchers have developed a process to convert polyethylene (PE)—the world’s most widely used plastic—into polypropylene; It is one of the 5 most common types of plastic in the world.
Today, unfortunately, a major fraction of PE is not recycled and is stored in landfills. The collected fraction is burned and reused in the form of energy. This approach to recycling is certainly not sustainable,” Damien Gironnet told indianexpress.com in an email. Gironnet is a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a co-author of the study. Journal of the American Chemical Society on friday.
According to the researchers’ preliminary analysis, if just 20 percent of the world’s PE plastic production could be recycled and replaced with this method, it could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by the equivalent of taking three million cars off the road.
The researchers developed a proof-of-concept for upgrading PE plastic: a reactor that creates a flow of propylene can be converted to PP using current technology. The reactor does this by cleaving the PE molecules several times into smaller propylene molecules. The process begins when a catalyst removes hydrogen from the PE chain, creating a site where a reaction can occur.
After this, the second catalyst finally opens the chain in two, the third catalyst moves the reaction to the PE chain, so that the process can be repeated with the first catalyst. When the process is complete, the finished product is 95 percent propylene. Another 5 percent is butane, a chemical with many uses in the plastics, gasoline, and rubber industries.
A similar process is documented in a research article published in the journal Science on Thursday. According to the researchers, the research team that produced the Science article used a more energy-intensive process.
Gironnet is confident that the technology is scalable and adaptable to current industry needs, but the research faces a few hurdles before it can be implemented on a large scale. “The biggest challenge is stability. To promote such a process, we need to identify the strongest catalysts. PE waste always comes with impurities. In order to remain scalable, we need to find catalysts that are not affected by these impurities,” explains Gironnet.
If the researchers find a stable enough catalyst, the PE that spins up doesn’t need to be pure, but if the catalyst is sensitive, that means the PE needs to be purified, which makes the solution more expensive. .
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