Pulsed pyrolysis offers better way to breakdown plastics into their building blocks

A new pyrolysis protocol for chemical recycling of polymers has been developed by researchers in the US. The technique, which uses pulses of electricity to heat the waste polymer, minimises side reactions and thereby produces more monomer.

As the inadequacies of traditional recycling to handle plastic waste become ever more apparent, scientists turn increasingly to chemical methods, either using it as a feedstock for producing other materials or depolymerising it completely so it can be made into pristine polymer from scratch. Many embryonic depolymerisation schemes, however, require replacing today’s commercial polymers with chemical alternatives that can be depolymerised using specific reactions.