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One Man’s Trash Can Be That Same Man’s Treasure

UNC-Chapel Hill’s Frank Leibfarth tests molecules to turn plastic waste into useful materials, diversifying our options for recycling. He focused on the largest class of plastics, polyolefins — also the most difficult to recycle. The work involved finding a molecule that’s perfectly tuned to react with a carbon-hydrogen bond that can go in and pluck off hydrogen and replace it with a chemical group that makes the plastic more useful with better properties.

“The chemistry is what makes recycling polyolefins particularly challenging, but chemists get really excited about it,” says Frank Leibfarth  , associate professor in the Department of Chemistry at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Topics:
Green Design & Manufacturing Materials Plastics Recycling Technologies

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    Transcript

    00:00:01 foreign plastic waste I think we've recognized in our society is a really enormous challenge uh and it's it's a challenge that will take a lot of different solutions to solve when Dr Frank leipfar I'm an associate professor in the chemistry department at UNC Chapel Hill so my group thinks a lot about how we

    00:00:28 try to contribute to the challenge of plastic waste what we've focused on so far is this class of plastic known as polyolephins this is polyethylene which is typically used as milk jugs or as a plastic bag you get from the grocery store and polypropylene which is plastic Tupperware containers you know yogurt containers or the outside of many cars is a polypropylene composite so this is

    00:00:52 by far the largest class of plastics and it's also the most difficult to recycle because of the chemistry so we've been thinking about how do we develop a molecule that is perfectly tuned to react with a carbon hydrogen bond that can actually go in and pluck off a hydrogen and replace it with a chemical group that actually makes that plastic more useful more functional and

    00:01:14 has better properties and ideally if we can do that on plastic waste right then we can get into this idea of upcycling plastic waste upcycling is a idea that you take plastic waste and you actually use that as a valuable resource and you take it into a chemical modification on it that actually makes it more valuable than the original material that was made

    00:01:37 directly from petroleum resources and we haven't kind of solved the chemistry and economic and kind of social issues that we need to solve to really put this in the world right now but we hope to get there there's no one Silver Bullet solution to this there's going to be many different solutions right that create this kind of more circular plastic economy that we

    00:01:58 all dream of uh so I think upcycling can hopefully fit into that and that's the exciting part about being in this field there's a huge problem it's an international problem and there's lots of places where science I think can contribute and make sure that the Technologies we're putting in place actually don't further contribute to things like climate change or CO2

    00:02:21 emissions thank you