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 ...

A new chemical process can essentially vaporize plastics that dominate the waste stream today and turn them into hydrocarbon building blocks for new plastics. The catalytic process, developed at 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 ...

Hundreds of millions of tons of single-use plastic ends up in landfills every year, and even the small percentage of plastic that gets recycled can’t last forever. But our group of materials ...

Lightweight parts, energy-saving processing or combining several process steps into one. It can all be summarized under one buzzword: sustainability. A technology that is highly promising is ...

A new study led by Colorado State University Distinguished Professor Eugene Chen outlines a path to creating advanced, recyclable plastics. Published in Nature, the study describes a breakthrough ...

Recycling plastic products is a challenge. Not only are a limited number of types of plastic recyclable, but because the recycling process also breaks down polymer chains and degrades the materials' ...

Polyethylene plastics -- single-use bags and general-purpose bottles -- are indestructable forever plastics. That also makes them hard to recycle. Chemists have found a way to break down the polymer - ...

Chemists have developed a catalytic process that turns the largest component of today's plastic waste stream, polyolefin plastic bags and bottles, into gases -- propylene and isobutylene -- that are ...