A radical new process "vaporizes" plastic bags and bottles to help make recycled materials. The innovative chemical procedure turns the ubiquitous waste items into hydrocarbon "building blocks" for ...

Graduate student RJ Conk adjusts a reaction chamber in which mixed plastics are degraded into the reusable building blocks of new polymers. A new chemical process can essentially vaporize plastics ...

One reason plastic waste persists in the environment is because there’s not much that can eat it. The chemical structure of most polymers is stable and different enough from existing food sources that ...

Current methods to recycle plastics often use expensive catalysts, harsh conditions and produce toxic byproducts. New process converts PET plastic into monomer building blocks, which can be recycled ...

The world is miserable at recycling plastics. Currently, just 10–15% of the plastic waste we generate annually is recycled — with the rest incinerated, buried in landfill or dumped as litter 1, 2. A ...

A tractor making piles of compost. Firms are developing bacteria and enzymes that might one day be used to break down microplastics in compost. Credit: Shutterstock Synthetic polymers have been on the ...

Note: Eastman Chemical Company’s first “molecular recycling” facility is now fully operational in Kingsport. It uses a process called methanolysis to reduce hard-to-recycle waste plastic to its ...

Yuwei Gu was hiking through Bear Mountain State Park in New York when inspiration struck. Plastic bottles littered the trail and more floated on a nearby lake. The jarring sight in such a pristine ...

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The Canadian chemical recycler is working to scale up a unique process it says is more flexible and cost effective than traditional pyrolysis. Image courtesy of Aduro Clean Technologies Inc. As it has ...