New Catalytic Process Turns Plastic Bags Into Adhesives
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:
New catalytic process turns plastic bags into adhesives:
While many cities and eight states have banned single-use plastics, bags and other polyethylene packaging still clog landfills and pollute rivers and oceans.
One major problem with recycling polyethylene, which makes up one-third of all plastic production worldwide, is economic: Recycled bags end up in low-value products, such as decks and construction material, providing little incentive to reuse the waste.
A new chemical process developed at the University of California, Berkeley, converts polyethylene plastic into a strong and more valuable adhesive and could change that calculus.
"The vision is that you would take a plastic bag that is of no value, and instead of throwing it away, where it ends up in a landfill, you would turn it into something of high value," said John Hartwig, the Henry Rapoport Chair in Organic Chemistry at UC Berkeley and leader of the research team. "You couldn't take all of this recycled plastic-hundreds of billions of pounds of polyethylene are produced each year-and turn it into a material with adhesive properties, but if you take some fraction of that and turn it into something that is of high value, that can change the economics of turning the rest of it into something that is of lower value."
Journal Reference:
Liye Chen, Katerina G. Malollari. Selective, Catalytic Oxidations of C-H Bonds in Polyethylenes Produce Functional Materials with Enhanced Adhesion, Chem (DOI: 10.1016/j.chempr.2020.11.020)
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