In the more than 100 years since researchers developed synthetic plastic, it has become the world’s most common engineered material—used in nearly everything humans produce, from automobiles and food packaging to medical implants and electronics.
While the technology used to produce plastics has advanced rapidly, the opposite is true for methods to recycle them: Of the 400 million tons of plastic produced each year, 9% or less is recycled. Currently, there are no industrial-scale technologies that truly recover and reuse the polymers that make up plastics.
But recycling researchers are trying to catch up. One promising innovation is solvent-based or dissolution recycling, in which plastic polymers are chemically dissolved and separated, ready to be reborn as new plastic products. University of Wisconsin-Madison chemical engineers are on the leading edge of this technology and are eager for industry to adopt dissolution recycling at the commercial scale.
Read the full story here: https://engineering.wisc.edu/news/uw-madison-researchers-map-out-a-promising-future-for-solvent-based-plastics-recycling/