Despite well-intended efforts to keep plastic water bottles, packaging and other items out of landfills, only 9% of plastics in the U.S. are recycled. One of the big problems is that plastics are made up of different materials that when mixed together limit their reuse. Scientists at Washington State University and the University of Washington announced this week that they have received a $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to help tackle the challenge.
The project includes research into technologies for taking mixed plastic waste and using a chemical process for breaking the plastics into their building-block monomers that can be put to other uses. “The process is designed to address the grand challenge in the plastic industry: how to deconstruct co‑mingled municipal waste plastics selectively. It sounds very straightforward, but there are a lot of technical challenges,” said Hongfei Lin, who is leading the project, in a statement.
Lin has also been spearheading research that uses chemical processes for turning certain kinds of plastics into hydrocarbon products that can be used to make jet fuel or for other applications. That research is focused on plastics made of polyethylene, which in the form of polyethylene terephthalate is used to make plastic bottles.