If there's one thing humans have figured out, it's how to produce plastic. Unfortunately, figuring out how to recycle and reuse it is another challenge altogether. But a team of researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is onto something big.
There has been growing awareness of the dire public health and contamination threats caused by the mass production of plastic. As plastic waste gathers, particularly in rivers and oceans, it harbors bacteria, releases toxic gases such as methane, and sheds both chemical contaminants and microplastics into the environment.
Many of those microplastics end up in food, water, and our bodies, where they've been linked to a plethora of health complications. Plastic waste also threatens wildlife, particularly marine animals, whether they're accidentally ingesting it or being entangled, suffocated, or strangled by it.
And while consumers have been able to use their purchasing power to turn the tide away from plastic in some regards, its production is still massively outpacing its recycling. Of the 400 million tons of plastic produced each year, less than 9% of it is recycled.
Most plastic recycling is done mechanically, by grinding up materials and using those pieces to form new ones. But this, the UW-Madison website explains, is far from an ideal process. Grinding destroys long polymer chains, making an inferior material that becomes unrecyclable after subsequent uses. Mechanical recycling is also limited to a particular subset of plastic products, and it can't process multilayer plastics, plastic films, or many of the other materials that make up the vast majority of plastic waste.
The UW-Madison team has another vision. It's been working on a solvent-based recycling method, solvent-targeted recovery and precipitation. This process uses additives to break down and "deep clean" plastics, separating them chemically back into their basic components. Importantly, STRAP recycling leaves long polymer chains intact, meaning that the new material is of the same high quality as its predecessor. It can also treat multiple types of plastic at once, allowing for a much broader scope of plastic inputs than mechanical recycling.
The UW-Madison researchers published a study in the journal Nature Chemical Engineering, which detailed their progress toward commercial-scale solvent recycling.
Charles Granger, a doctoral candidate and study co-author, said the paper — which also covered similar efforts by other researchers — reveals encouraging results.
"Dissolution recycling is a viable technology worth adopting," he said. "Even at this early stage, it promises both significant environmental benefits over virgin plastic production and strong economic potential."
The STRAP process — and similar solvent-based recycling processes — face two basic obstacles. One is how to remove contaminants, including dyes. The team is working to figure out the most effective way to separate and treat these chemicals.
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Yes 👍 The other is scaling up the process. It's a major reason that the researchers are launching a pilot-scale plant at Michigan Technological University, where they'll be able to recycle 55 pounds of plastic per hour.
"We started with very small, simple reactors in the laboratory," engineering professor and study co-author George Huber said. "Now we've gone to more complex reactors in the lab; hopefully our pilot-scale system will be operational in early 2026." That means finding industrial partners eager to invest in scaling up plastic recycling processes.
Other solvent-based recycling technologies are also approaching commercial-scale use. But rather than viewing them as competitors, the UW-Madison team is excited by the idea of driving the industry forward together.
"There's so much plastic waste material out there and everyone is tuned to processing a particular feedstock," graduate student and co-author Reid Van Lehn said. "We estimate that in North America, Europe, and Japan, solvent-based recycling could be close to a $25 billion per year business. It's hard to imagine one company capturing that whole market. There's enough plastic for everyone."
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