Plastics are ubiquitous. They are in our clothes, coffee mugs, and car batteries just to name a few examples. As the world population continues to grow so does our consumption of plastics. Polyethylene terephthalate or PET, better known as recycling plastic #1 is one particular plastic we encounter daily. If you have ever consumed a soda from a plastic bottle, chances are this plastic bottle had a recycling #1 stamped on the bottom of it. Unfortunately, PET bottles don't get recycled the same way as cardboard or metal does. Meaning the soda bottle you tossed into the recycling bin doesn't get washed out and refilled and then restocked at your local grocery store or vending machine. Nope, they usually will get filtered out the waste stream and crushed, ground up and then reused into a product that doesn't require high purity PET plastic material.
But what if we could actually recycle PET plastic back to a form where it is highly pure? After many years of research, scientists at IBM and Stanford have found an organic catalyst that would do just that. Dubbed as a chemical recycling process or depolymerizing plastic, PET bottles are heated in ethylene glycol in the presence of an organocatalyst. The end result is the isolation of bis terephthalate (BHET) in high yield with minimum waste products. BHET can then be transformed back into PET plastic.
A Youtube video about this process can be viewed below:
What will this mean for the future of plastics? Maybe we will be able to recycle and reuse PET plastics rather than burying them our landfill. Now that's pretty awesome.
