Plastic Pollution: Problem of the Past?

Plastic pollution is a serious problem, as about 800 million pounds of plastics and polymers are produced annually worldwide. Now, a team at Northwestern, led by Professor John Torkelson, has discovered a way to break down and reuse previously unrecyclable plastics. Watch this video to learn more about the method.

“You could take an empty 2-liter soda bottle and cut that into bits, reprocess it and form another bottle from that material,” says John Torkelson  , the Walter P. Murphy Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering at McCormick.

Transcript

00:00:06 Plastic pollution is a major problem. About  800 billion pounds of plastics and polymers   are produced annually worldwide. That's about  100 pounds per person on the face of the Earth.   There are two major classes of polymers. The  plastic bags you get at the grocery store,   those are things that are thermoplastics.  Thermosets are materials like rubber bands   or rubber tires that are chemically crosslinked.  Thermosets constitute roughly 20 percent of all   polymers produced worldwide, and that 20 percent  is not recycled at any effective level at all.   So we are developing ways to take polymers that  are made into crosslinked materials and to make   sure that the crosslinks we put into them are  robust at use conditions. So the materials have   good properties under conditions of use,  but where at high temperature, the bonds   actually come apart and then the chains  are actually able to be melt processed,  

00:01:13 and upon cooling back to use conditions,  the bonds — the crosslinks — come back   together. The hope here is that a significant  fraction of crosslinked polymer materials can   be effectively recycled or maybe even upcycled  into materials that are of even higher value.