When most people guess of plastic taking up blank space in landfill for centuries , they might fancy PET , the plastic used to make water supply bottles . But the tenuous motion picture plastic used for bags and packaging is far more abundant , and it ’s much more probable to get contaminated with food and crude , making it hard to salvage for recycling . Now a startup calledBioCellectionsays it ’s found a way to get more use out of these plastics by melt them down into constituent liquids , WIREDreports .
Before most charge card can be reuse , it first needs to be cleaned . In sphere with mellow quality standards , it ’s not unusual for peculiarly unsportsmanlike plastics to be throw away altogether .
The method developed by BioCellection works on plastic film plastic no matter how greasy or sticky it is . As Miranda Wang , one of the caller ’s cobalt - founders , tellsWIRED , the plastic just needs to be shred , loaded into a glass container , and soaked in a clear liquid catalyst at 248 ° F for the chemical response to take place . In the mien of the catalyst , the polymer chain in the charge plate break down into many unlike compounds with two to seven carbon per mountain range linkup . The final result is n’t just melted charge plate — it ’s organic liquids that can be repurposed to make new material . Adipic acid , one of the resulting compounds , can be used to construct nylon habiliment and car parts .
As the world ’s formative waste product continue topile up , scientists are scrambling for novel ways to break it down . In2016 , Nipponese scientist discovered a type of bacteria that crunch on non - biodegradable plastic , andtwo yearslater another team accidentally engineered that same bacterium to be more efficient . BioCellection initially turned to credit card - eat bacteria when bet for ways to transgress down formative film , but before long ground that the germ were much more concerned in the nutrient contaminant . The liquid catalyst introduce a fashion around this .
The unexampled plastic - degrade process is n’t ready to be applied on a big scale , but BioCellection design to have a machine able of breaking down 5 metric tons of charge plate a day quick by 2019 . The team is also interested in expanding the method acting to other materials like rigid polyethylene charge plate .
[ h / tWIRED ]
