New plastic can be recycled over and over

Kampala, Uganda | THE INDEPENDENT | A new kind of plastic can, when exposed to the right chemicals, break down into the same basic building blocks that it came from and be rebuilt again and again. The recyclable material is more durable than previous attempts to create reusable plastics, researchers reported April 26 in the journal `Science’.

Only about 10 percent of plastic ever made gets recycled, according to a 2017 study in Science Advances. But major impediment to plastic recycling is that most plastics degrade into molecules that are not immediately useful. Transforming those molecules back into plastic or into some other product requires many chemical reactions, which makes the recycling process less efficient. And while biodegradable plastics have become popular in recent years, they break down only if the right microbes are present. More often than not, these plastics end up lingering in landfills or floating in the ocean. Creating plastics that could be broken down into their building blocks and reused without additional processing and purifying could help reduce the pollution buildup.

Polymer chemist Jianbo Zhu and his colleagues at Colorado State University in Fort Collins set out to solve this challenge. The researchers were able to repeat experiments several times, showing that, in theory, they have a plastic that could be infinitely recyclable. But it is not perfect yet.