Scientists Created a Plastic That’s Infinitely Recyclable

Plastic is suffocating the planet, but what if we could make recycling plastic more efficient? This Lawrence Berkeley National Lab team has created a brand new kind of plastic that can be recycled endlessly. Are You Seasoning Your Food With Microplastics? - https://youtu.be/ZFgpudNSArI Read More: Closed-loop recycling of plastics enabled by dynamic covalent diketoenamine bonds https://www.nature.com/articles/s41557-019-0249-2 "The closed-loop polymer life cycles enabled by PDKs contrast with those for conventional polymers, which are synthesized using irreversible bond-forming reactions that make it difficult and costly to recover the original monomers in high purity. Furthermore, while dynamic covalent polymers have been designed, in principle, around the ability to exchange bonds27, examples of energy-efficient depolymerization and chemical separations to obtain immediately reusable monomers are exceedingly rare. " Plastic Gets a Do-Over: Breakthrough Discovery Recycles Plastic From the Inside Out https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2019/05/06/recycling-plastic-from-the-inside-out/ According to the researchers, the problem with many plastics is that the chemicals added to make them useful – such as fillers that make a plastic tough, or plasticizers that make a plastic flexible – are tightly bound to the monomers and stay in the plastic even after it’s been processed at a recycling plant. Facts and Figures about Materials, Waste and Recycling https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-and-recycling/plastics-material-specific-data "PA used data from the American Chemistry Council and the National Association for PET Container Resources to measure the recycling of plastic. While overall the amount of recycled plastics is relatively small—3.1 million tons for a 9.1 percent recycling rate in 2015—the recycling of some specific types of plastic containers is more significant. The recycling rate of PET bottles and jars was 29.9 percent in 2015, and the