Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumScientists Say They've Cooked Up an Endlessly Recyclable Plastic
Plastics arent recycled nearly as much as wed like them to be, but a team from Berkeley Lab has developed a method to hopefully make that process easier. In a recently published study, these researches describe a new type of plastic that can be broken down at the molecular level to create new plastic without any deterioration in quality. The goal is to improve the recycling process so that fewer plastics end up in landfills or oceans.
Most plastics were never made to be recycled, said lead author Peter Christensen, a postdoctoral researcher at Berkeley Labs Molecular Foundry, in a statement. But we have discovered a new way to assemble plastics that takes recycling into consideration from a molecular perspective.
Every plastic is made up of polymers, large molecules that are made up of smaller compounds called monomers. As the researchers noted in a press release, the traditional method of making plastic involves adding chemicals that stick to the monomers and are hard to remove during the recycling process. As a result, bits of plastics with different chemical compositions get all mixed up, and its tough to know what sort of a plastic the recycling process will ultimately spit out. Often, the plastic wont be as durable in its next life.
The new plastic this team has cooked upwhat theyre calling called polydiketoenamine, or PDKcould make recycling more appealing because all thats needed is some acid to separate its chemical additives from the monomers. Then its possible to create a new plastic item with the same integrity as the original. The researchers hope is that this new plastic material could come to replace various plastics that cant be recycled currently because of how theyre created: those in shoes or phone cases, for instance.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/environment/scientists-say-theyve-cooked-up-an-endlessly-recyclable-plastic/ar-AAB2wKo?li=BBUPk4T
appal_jack
(3,813 posts)I teach recycling workshops to schoolkids a few times per year, and lately I was wrestling with how fraudulent the notion of plastics recycling is, and how I might communicate that to elementary schoolers without becoming either completely fatalist or dishonest.
The last few times I have taught the fourth graders, I note how difficult recycling plastic can be, and emphasize the "Refuse, Reduce, & Reuse" ideas, with recycling as the least bad choice. How great it would be to be able to say "if you put your old shoes in the recycling bin, they will become someone else's new shoes (or fleec jacket, or bike helmet, or packaging, or...)
k&r,
-app