PDK offers circular solution to plastic waste

Key to the breakthrough by a team from the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is the ability to break the plastic down into its constituent parts at the molecular level.

The new material - poly(diketoenamine), or PDK -  has been reported in Nature Chemistry.

"Most plastics were never made to be recycled," said lead author Peter Christensen, a postdoctoral researcher at Berkeley Lab's Molecular Foundry. "But we have discovered a new way to assemble plastics that takes recycling into consideration from a molecular perspective."

All plastics are made up of polymers, which are composed of repeating units of shorter carbon-containing compounds called monomers.

According to the researchers, the problem with many plastics is that the chemicals added to make them useful - such plasticisers that make a plastic flexible - are tightly bound to the monomers and stay in the plastic even after it's been processed at a recycling plant.