Page 60 - Plastics News Issue - January 2025
P. 60
IN THE NEWS
Looking at the ever rising issue in concern to technology is very effective when reconstruct-
plastic waste and our environment, new and ing other products made of plastics like PET bot-
improved uses of recycling plastics are being tles that are used in packaging beverages.
adopted to ensure the recycling process is ge-
neric, fast and cheap. All such trends not only Gasification: Another broadly defined chemical
help in the fight against the use of plastic waste recycling method is gasification: The technology
but also introduce the topic of new opportuni- turns the collected plastic waste into syn-gas
ties in the management of waste. or synthesis gas through the process of heat-
ing and pressing the material under a limited
1. Chemical Recycling: Breaking Down Plastics amount of oxygen. This syngas can be utilized
to Build New Materials as a fuel for electricity production or converted
into products that can be utilized to produce
Chemical recycling also known as advanced re- other products.
cycling is a step up in the technology of the re-
cycling process. It could therefore be accurately Chemical recycling technologies are more ca-
described as a completely different process pable of recycling many more types of plastics
from the mechanical recycling processes that in- than traditional recycling; ones such as multiple
volve the dismantling, remanufacturing the plas- layered packaging, or any form of plastic waste
tics and reshaping them into new articles from likely to be contaminated with other material.
the mass of the waste stream and other forms Chemical recycling deals with the returning of
of plastics. plastics into their simplest form of utilization
There are several methods within chemical re- which makes it unique.
cycling, including: 2. Enzyme-Based Recycling: Nature’s Role in
Plastic Degradation
Pyrolysis: This is a method used in disposing
used plastics where these are burnt under con- Other modern trends in the recycling of plastics
ditions of no oxygen and in so doing decompos- are enzymatic recycling, a process that uses en-
es polymers into different other small molecules. zymes to decomposition plastics into their mo-
This process gives other useful co-products such lecular structures. This process is still relatively
as synthetic oil which can be further refined into young, but it appears to have nearly limitless
various fuel, chemicals and /or plastics. The ma- potential for lifting the scourge of plastic waste.
jor benefit of pyrolysis is therefore its versatility
which can handle mixed and contaminated plas- Scientists have identified particular enzymes
tic waste – an issues with traditional recycling that are capable of degrading plastics includ-
methods. ing PET into their original monomers. These en-
zymes function by breaking up firstly the chemi-
Depolymerization: Plastics recycling is a way in cal bonds linking the plastic molecules so as to
which plastics are broken down back to polym- make it easier to recycle the material.
erization in a bid to acquire monomers. These
monomers can then be used to produce virgin- PETase and MHETase Enzymes: PETase is an en-
quality of plastic materials so that the plastic zyme which was found in a bacterium Ideonella
could be ‘recycled back’ to its original state. This sakaiensis that feed on PET plastic. It is possible
60 PLASTICS NEWS January 2025
