Scientists figured out a new way to recycle a common type of plastic

Scientists have developed a new way to recycle a common type of plastic and it could prove to be a big game-changer for solving our world’s growing plastic waste problems. 

Plastic pollution has become a major global issue and the United Nations noted that the equivalent of one garbage truck's worth of plastic is dumped in the ocean each minute. 

Humans have created roughly 7 to 9.2 trillion tonnes of plastic waste between 1950 and 2017, most of which the United Nations says was either dumped or has ended up in landfills. 

The scale of the problem seems quite insurmountable but a newly developed method of breaking down a plastic known as polyethylene terephthalate could change everything. 

Polyethylene terephthalate is one of the most common plastics in the world and is found in everything from water bottles and baby wipes to clothing and mattresses according to Made Safe, a website dedicated to changing the way products are made with plastics. 

“We pat ourselves on the back when we toss something into the recycling bin, but most of that recyclable plastic never winds up being recycled,” said researcher Oana Luca. 

Luca is an Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Department of Chemistry and co-author of a study detailing the discovery of a new way to break down plastic material. 

“We wanted to find out how we could recover molecular materials, the building blocks of plastics, so that we can use them again.” Luca said, and to do that they used electricity. 

Well, the researchers used electricity in combination with a special type of molecule that was designed to break down polyethylene terephthalate when electricity was applied to it. 

Screenshot from YouTube @UniversityofColoradoBoulder

Experiments showed reactions began disintegrating the plastics in minutes whereas its standard lifecycle would see the test pieces sitting in the ground for centuries before they began decomposing. 

“It was awesome to actually observe the reaction progress in real-time,” the study’s lead author Phuc Pham explained in a news release on his team's research. “The solution first turns a deep pink color, then becomes clear as the polymer breaks apart.”

Screenshot from YouTube @UniversityofColoradoBoulder

This new way of breaking down plastic isn’t like other ways of recycling and it provides a much better way of reusing our trash compared to how we’re collecting and managing  according to the study’s authors. 

Screenshot from YouTube @UniversityofColoradoBoulder

Most municipalities are already having trouble collecting the vast amount of recyclable plastics that produce every day according to the University of Colorado Boulder’s release on the research, let alone turning those plastics back into products we can actually use. 

Screenshot from YouTube @UniversityofColoradoBoulder

The result of this issue is that less than one-third of all polyethylene terephthalate plastic in the United States actually gets recycled, and that’s a problem which has been slowly compounding the problem as more and more recycling plants fall behind. 

One solution has been to melt plastics with acid but the process can alter their chemical makeup, rendering them less useful than they otherwise could have been for producing new plastic products. 

“You end up changing the materials mechanically,” Luca explained. “Using current methods of recycling, if you melt a plastic bottle, you can produce, for example, one of those disposable plastic bags that we now have to pay money for at the grocery store.”

What Luca and her team's new process does is break down polyethylene terephthalate into its fundamental components so that what’s left after the reaction takes place can be used to make a product of the same quality as it was broken down from. 

To do this, the team used a process called electrolysis as well as a molecule known as [N-DMBI]+ salt and to smash small pieces of polyethylene terephthalate plastic apart while preserving their chemical makeup.

Screenshot from YouTube @UniversityofColoradoBoulder

Unfortunately the research team doesn’t quite understand how the reactions are working but they have shown that they work, and that polyethylene terephthalate can be broken down into its component parts without altering the plastics chemical makeup. 

The researchers reported that they’ve been able to break down 40 milligrams of plastic in seven hours, and while that might seem small, it's a big step in the right direction for a new tool that could someday be used to help the world manage its plastic problem.

“Although this is a great start, we believe that lots of work needs to be done to optimize the process as well as scale it up so it can eventually be applied on an industrial scale,” Pham said.