We may have just figured out a way to make plastics part of the energy future.

Dionisios G. Vlachos has plasticity in his mind. These things fill up the landfill, but it seems foolish to find a second life for it.

Vlachos likened it to building a house: "Building a house is difficult, but it's easy to smash it," he told Inverse. "This is the other way around. Plastic is easy to make and difficult to decompose."

The problem is that Americans like plastic. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, more than 14.5 million tons of plastic containers and packaging were produced in 2018 alone. Although it is easy to refine crude oil into the long carbon chains needed to make plastic bags and water bottles, it is complicated and inefficient to reverse this process or find an effective afterlife. There was a reason why China stopped buying the world’s plastic waste a few years ago, and now this means that most of our “recyclable” plastic ends up in landfill.

This is not to say that it is impossible to recycle plastic into petroleum and then use it in other useful products such as gasoline (or even other types of plastic). The problem is that the way to do this will not consume more energy than saved. If the recycling of plastic bottles requires more fuel than the fuel produced in the process, there is no benefit in turning a pile of plastic bottles into gasoline.

Flacio, a professor of physics at the University of Delaware, may have found a way to change all of this. A new study by the Vlacho team on Science Advances may eventually crack the code to crack the plastic. Literally.

The latest news-finding a way to make any number of useful fuels from plastic in an efficient way-gasoline, jet fuel, diesel, and even more advanced lubricants such as motor oil-is a holy grail for energy scientists .

Vlachos told Inverse: “This is the first technology that can recycle the most difficult-to-dispose plastics into truly useful things.” “This is the best way to recycle single-use plastics and packaging such as polyethylene and polypropylene. "

Current refineries can easily make plastics, converting high-energy oil into the long carbon chains necessary to make light and strong plastic bags or water bottles. But we cannot really reverse this process.

Of course plastic can be burned. You can throw it into the fireplace and it will generate heat. But it also generates a lot of pollution (low efficiency and serious pollution), and requires a lot of plastic to generate useful heat. So how does the low energy density plastic turn back to the high energy density oil?

How it works—"This is the opposite of a refinery," Vlachos said. His method uses two ready-made ingredients, zeolite and platinum-among other things, zeolite is used to refine crude oil into gasoline. Applying zeolite to solid plastics only causes it to decompose once, and then the process stops. Basically the same is true for platinum. Vlachos explained that using a catalyst alone is ineffective, but by combining platinum and zeolite to dance as a pair, "they will do magic."

The trick is to "crack" the long carbon chains in plastics into shorter C chains that are much more useful and versatile. It is easy to "refine" the oil to grow the C chain, but it is very difficult to separate them again. Of course, this is part of the idea-when you are full of groceries, you don't want your plastic bag to fall apart. By putting these two catalysts in a pressurized plastic tank, Vlachos and his team found that they can obtain very high yields of useful hydrocarbons even at relatively low temperatures.

In short, platinum cracks first, and then the zeolite starts to work, further decomposing. Combining the acidity of zeolite with platinum nanoparticles can obtain high-yield liquid hydrocarbons (also known as oil) with few solid by-products.

They are able to obtain 85% of the maximum liquid output of the original material, and most of the rest is exhausted, leaving almost no solids. According to the study, “the catalyst is active in transforming the most abundant plastic waste components, including HDPE, PP, polystyrene (PS), layered PP-PE-PS composite materials, and daily plastic bags, bottles, etc.”

Adjusting the ratio of the two catalysts can optimize the resulting mixture to produce different fuels, including any fuel from jet fuel to gasoline to diesel. "The magic lies in the material," Vlachos said. "Put the catalyst in the pot, put the plastic in it, pressurize it, and then you can get the oil out."

He said it takes about 300 half-liter water bottles to make enough oil to make a gallon of gasoline — or two pickup truck lathes full of water bottles to fill a fuel tank.

The next step-Last year, a patent was filed for the process and additional research is underway, but Vlachos stated that it can be successfully commercialized within 5 to 10 years. "If you try to do this overnight, it won't happen," he said, noting that it is crucial to eliminate impurities such as food waste on recycled plastics.

Millions of tons of plastic are piled up in landfills, and millions of tons are generated every year. If there is an energy-efficient way to recycle all the carbon and make the most of it, you can be sure that the world’s energy companies will carefully study this process and whether you can use a bunch of empty water bottles to make your next gallon of gasoline.

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