Because of the material make up, less than 10% of consumer plastics are recycled. Two professors, one from UW-Madison and the other from Michigan Tech, are hoping to increase that number.
For years, consumers have been recycling cans, plastic bottles, cardboard and paper — a lot of materials that are made in Northeast Wisconsin. But there is still a large percentage of plastic packaging materials that end up in the landfill.
“Unfortunately, most plastics we don’t know how to recycle. Your flexible films, your grocery bags — the stuff that wraps around your meat packaging. When you go to the grocery store, you buy all that stuff in plastic packaging. Those types of plastic, we don’t have the infrastructure to be able to recycle today,” says George Huber, a College of Engineering professor at UW-Madison.
Huber has come up with a method to recycle materials that are currently being thrown out with the trash. The new process is called STRAP (Solvent Targeted Recovery and Precipitation) and according to Huber, “It uses solvents to selectively solubilize one plastic over another. Then, we precipitate it out, and then we’re left behind with a pure plastic.”