Upcycling plastics to cut greenhouse gas emissions

The team, from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and University of California, Santa Barbara, worked with materials science company Dow on the process, described by researchers as a breakthrough.

“The world needs more and better options for extracting the energy and molecular value from its waste plastics,” said co-lead author Susannah Scott, distinguished professor and Mellichamp chair of Sustainable Catalytic Processing at UC Santa Barbara.

The researchers explained that conventional plastic recycling methods result in low-value plastic molecules, offering little incentive to recycle the ‘mountains’ of plastic waste accumulated over the past several decades.

“Turning polyethylene [PE] into propylene, which can then be used to make a new polymer, is how we start to build a circular economy for plastics,” Scott said in a statement.

Damien Guironnet, co-author and professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Illinois, described how the team began by conceptualising the approach and demonstrating its promise first through theoretical modelling.