04 Sep 2024 --- Researchers have developed a new chemical process capable of vaporizing plastics and converting them into hydrocarbon building blocks for new materials. This catalytic process breaks down two of the most dominant types of post-consumer plastic waste — PE and PP — into monomers, offering a potential solution to packaging waste management. The team of researchers from the US tested solid catalysts and discovered that sodium on alumina can effectively break down different kinds of polyolefin polymer chains, leaving one of the two pieces with a reactive carbon-carbon double bond at the end. Meanwhile, tungsten oxide on silica adds the carbon atom at the end of the chain to ethylene gas, which is constantly streamed through the reaction chamber to form a propylene molecule.
