Endlessly recyclable plastic (Javascript required.)
By separating plastic monomers from chemical additives, researchers may have created fully recyclable plastics.
Molecular scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory developed a new type of plastic: polydiketoenamine, or PDK. When immersed in an acidic solution, PDK monomers were broken down and were freed from the additive compounds used in plastic production.
Berkeley Lab staff scientist Brett Helms said: "With PDKs, the immutable bonds of conventional plastics are replaced with reversible bonds that allow the plastic to be recycled more effectively."
Commercial plastics generally contain additives such as dyes or fillers to make them hard, stretchy, coloured or clear. The problem is these additives have different chemical compositions and are hard to separate from the monomers.
Also at Berkeley Lab.
See also: Researchers develop plastic that they are calling the 'Holy Grail' of recycling
This infinitely-recyclable plastic might help us finally clean up landfills and oceans
Closed-loop recycling of plastics enabled by dynamic covalent diketoenamine bonds (DOI: 10.1038/s41557-019-0249-2) (DX)
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 09 2019, @06:45PM (1 child)
It's a burning process. You just add oxygen.
But in either case, the purpose of burning properly is not to be economically competitive with gas powered plants that gets its fuel from a pipeline. The purpose is to reduce garbage and harm that it causes. I hope you agree that harm reduction is priority before we can have some panacea solution to this problem?
TFS gives us academic lego block in solving a tiny portion of the issue. But it does nothing for policy or solution to the plastic problem.
That's true - it's reactive. But this problem is solved, long time ago.
https://waste-management-world.com/a/pvc-to-burn-or-not-to-burn [waste-management-world.com]
Also, we have technology to monitor these emissions. And as you can see, coal is the problem, not garbage burning.
https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/chem/surface/level/overlay=so2smass/orthographic=-78.02,25.18,427 [nullschool.net]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday May 09 2019, @10:33PM
It's a burning process. You just add oxygen.
Pyrolysis [wikipedia.org] is not burning.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford