Plastic bottles and bags can be vaporised into chemical building blocks and turned into new plastics with all the properties of virgin material. There are hurdles still to overcome, but the new ...

A new process to recycle existing plastics indefinitely and reduce the flood of plastics into landfills is being developed by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley. From sandwich bags ...

Graduate student RJ Conk adjusts a reaction chamber in which mixed plastics are degraded into the reusable building blocks of new polymers. A new chemical process can essentially vaporize plastics ...

Researchers from Nanjing Forestry University and Tsinghua University have reportedly developed a way of ...

Only a small percentage of plastic bags and other polyethylene packaging is recycled because only low-value products can be made from this waste. Chemists have created a catalytic process that ...

Current methods to recycle plastics often use expensive catalysts, harsh conditions and produce toxic byproducts. New process converts PET plastic into monomer building blocks, which can be recycled ...

One single-use plastic bag takes at least 450 years to degrade. Give Miranda Wang three hours and she can reduce ten of them into liquid. Wang is the first to discover a chemical process that tackles ...

Recycling sounds great in principle (because it is), but a frustrating number of devils lurk in the details. For example, while some materials like aluminum can readily be melted down and turned right ...

We know that most plastics thrown into the recycling bin don’t get recycled, but what about the ones that do? According to new research, those also end up spitting bits of plastic back into the ...

Polyethylene plastics — in particular, the ubiquitous plastic bag that blights the landscape — are notoriously hard to recycle. They’re sturdy and difficult to break down, and if they’re recycled at ...

There is no shortage of news about plastic’s ubiquity or its harms. Microplastics are in clouds, drinking water, playgrounds and our blood. Marine mammals are entangled in and ingest plastic at ...