Plastic fantastic

A new chemical method for more sustainable recycling of plastics has arrived. Recently described in Nature, the technique, developed by chemists at the University of Konstanz, can recover around 96 per cent of the original material. The work builds on existing chemical recycling of polyethylene – a process that has been tricky to scale up due to the high temperatures required (above 600°C) and the limited recoverability of the product. The newly described method uses ‘breaking points’ in the polyethylene chain to break the plastic polymer down, lowering the required temperature to 120°C while retaining the material properties of the raw product.