Tandem catalysis and smart design offer new route to polypropylene plastic

Two catalysts have been combined in a way that could revolutionise production of a key plastic. The Northwestern University team’s approach uses platinum nanoparticles to dehydrogenate propane to plastic precursor propylene, and selectively burns off the resulting hydrogen with an indium(III) oxide coating.

‘This big advance comes in making a material that can carry out the dehydrogenation step and the selective combustion step at the same time, and under the same conditions,’ says Northwestern’s Justin Notestein. The team attains yields of 37% percent, compared with a previous best by other researchers of 20%. ‘I didn’t think it would work quite as well as it did,’ Notestein admits.