We've managed to accumulate so much plastic trash that it's daunting to think about what could be done with the tons upon tons of nonbiodegradable waste. And as much as we are trying to scale back our dependence on single-use plastics, we continue to add to the global plastic trash hoard.
and disposable and take-away packaging.
"If we make these surfactants from fossil fuels now and you could make them from waste plastics, then you are not usingto make surfactants anymore, and you're getting another use out of the carbon that went into the plastics," said chemical engineering professor Susannah Scott, who holds UCSB's Mellichamp Chair in Sustainable Catalytic Processing.
waste—plastics are repurposed in a method that shortcuts conventional"dirty" processes for making surfactants while giving single-use plastics one more shot at usefulness.in which they debuted a catalytic method to break the strong carbon-carbon bonds that make plastic the difficult-to-degrade material it is, then rearrange the molecular chains into alkylaromatic rings.
"It just screams along," Scott said."It makes the alkylaromatics faster, and we can tune it to make the right-size molecules." In the new paper, they focused on finding the optimal ratio of acid sites to metal sites in their catalyst, she explained."It turns out they work together. They have different roles, but you need both of them to be there and in the right ratio so the catalytic cycle doesn't get stuck at any point.
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