Mixed plastic waste converted into useful materials in dual chemical–biological approach

A new process converts mixed plastic waste into a single useful chemical feedstock. The procedure uses a combination of chemical and biological methods to upcycle three common plastics, and could offer a way to improve recycling processes by eliminating the need to first sort and separate different waste materials.

‘We wanted to develop processes that would enable the conversion of mixed plastic waste that’s quite heterogeneous,’ says Gregg Beckham from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado, US. ‘The motivation, in that respect, was really to attempt to avoid the expensive and quite tedious sorting of mixed plastic waste. And in many cases plastic waste is actually physically bonded together – like in multiplayer packaging, or in textiles.’