Plastic Waste Upcycling

The overgrowing plastic production and its adverse effects on the environment after use highly demand the need for plastics recycling. While the most practiced route is mechanical recycling, also called ‘downcycling’, it’s mainly the chemical recycling method that can break down these plastics to their monomers or even modify them to other value-added products with higher purity. Bara’s lab is currently doing noteworthy plastics upcycling projects, including the plastic materials PVC (Polyvinylchloride), PET (Polyethylene terephthalate), and PS (polystyrene).

Though highly used, the least recycled PVC poses a significant challenge to recycle due to the chlorine content in the monomer unit. In Bara’s lab, actions are taken to valorize PVC to dehydrochlorination and enable depolymerization toward small molecules and oligomers that can be upcycled for the target compound. In contrast to PVC, PET has gained many upcycling initiatives in many research labs and industry. In addition to this, we are making an effort to implement novel depolymerization technique that would not only be effective on a small scale but also be advantageous to upscale in terms of energy efficiency.

PS is one of the significant synthetic plastics that is getting less attention in recycling strategies as well after PVC. The existing PS recycling techniques simply consist of dissolution in certain solvents and pyrolysis. Our lab is dedicated to finding an effective PS modification route via chemical upcycling.