New plastic designed in the United States can be disassembled and recycled like building blocks
Beijing, May 8 (Xinhua) -- Researchers in the United States have designed a highly efficient recyclable plastic that can be disassembled at the molecular level into "parts" similar to building blocks and reassembled repeatedly into products with completely different looks and textures.
The US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory recently released a press release said that the new plastic named PDK (polydiketoenamine), can be completely recycled, repeated use. The related paper was published in the new issue of the British journal Nature Chemistry.
Plastics are polymers made up of a large number of organic molecular monomers. When producing plastic products, it is often necessary to add other substances to achieve the desired hardness, elasticity, color, and so on. Monomer molecules are difficult to separate once combined with additives, resulting in many plastic products that are difficult to break down into raw materials and have very low recycling value.
The special feature of the new plastic PDK is that as long as it is soaked in a strong acidic solution, the chemical bond between the monomer molecule and the additive is easy to be broken, and the monomer material in the original state is separated and used again for production to achieve "closed loop" utilization. This is similar to the metal melting, separated from impurities, can be re-cast into any product.
At present, the recycling rate of waste plastic products is low, and most of them are landfill or incinerated as garbage, or even directly into the natural environment. Researchers plan to develop products with different properties on the basis of PDK plastic, which are widely used in many fields such as textile, 3D printing and foam, replacing existing plastics that cannot be recycled and greatly reducing the damage to the environment.