A team at Oak Ridge National Lab is hoping to help get rid of plastic waste through the process.
OAK RIDGE, Tenn. — For years, people have been trying to find the best ways to recycle plastic.
“We’ve heard a lot in the news about plastic waste accumulation being a major challenge for the environment in recent years,” said Jeffrey Foster, a Research Scientist with the Chemical Science Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “And so, we’re developing technologies to address this plastic to convert it into other valuable chemical building blocks.”
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Foster and his team at ORNL are now finding ways to break down plastics are the chemical level.
“(A) Polymer is a fundamental building block of plastic and so when you think about plastic bags or tires or other forms of plastic these are essentially constructed from molecules called polymers,” Foster said.
The team said most of the materials they’re working with are usually harder to break down, such as tires.
“We take one of the harder to address feedstock like tires and convert it into a durable tough plastic instead,” Foster said.
But one of the questions they’re asking now is, what can be made out of these newly broken down materials?
“We’re figuring out how we can control the properties of these materials and what sort of space and properties we can access,” Foster said, “You know, can we make elastic or stretchier materials, can we make tough durable plastics? We’re finding there’s a lot of compositional space there.”
The project is still in its early phases, but researchers are already thinking about how to make this “upcycling” available to a wider audience.
“Once we can demonstrate that this works, this chemistry works on a larger more manufacturing relevant scale then we can start to think about broad question about how this will impact the market and things like that,” Foster said.
If you’d like to learn more about this project you can find more information here.