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REVOLUTIONARY ECO-FRIENDLY, INFINITELY RECYCLABLE PDK PLASTIC HAS BEEN DEVELOPED BY BEREKELY LABS

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REVOLUTIONARY ECO-FRIENDLY, INFINITELY RECYCLABLE PDK PLASTIC HAS BEEN DEVELOPED BY BEREKELY LABS

Plastics are a part of nearly every product we use on a daily basis. And with a lot of use, comes a lot of waste, and plastic is very harmful to all the life forms on Earth.

A team led by Corinne Scown, Brett Helms, Jay Keasling, and Kristin Persson at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) set out to change that. 

Less than two years ago, Helms announced the invention of a new plastic that could tackle the waste crisis head-on. Called poly(diketoenamine), or PDK, the material has all the convenient properties of traditional plastics while avoiding the environmental pitfalls, because, unlike traditional plastics, PDKs can be recycled indefinitely with no loss in quality. 

 The team has released a study that shows what can be accomplished if the manufacturers began using PDKs on large scale, in which a simulation for a 20,000-metric-ton-per-year facility that puts out new PDKs and takes in used PDK waste for recycling, then calculated the chemical inputs, technology needed, greenhouse gas emissions, then compared their findings to the equivalent figures of production of conventional plastics. 

“These days, there is a huge push for adopting circular economy practices in the industry. Everyone is trying to recycle whatever they’re putting out in the market,” said Nemi Vora, the first author on the report. “We started talking to industry about deploying 100% infinitely recycled plastics and have received a lot of interest.”

“The questions are how much it will cost, what the impact on energy use and emissions will be, and how to get there from where we are today,” added Helms, a staff scientist at Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry. “The next phase of our collaboration is to answer these questions.”

To date, more than 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic material have been produced, and the vast majority of this has ended up in landfills or waste incineration plants. Out of which only a small proportion of plastics are recycled, where they are remelted and then re-shaped into new products. But this technique has its limited benefits as the plastic resin is made from polymers, long chains of monomers, and to give plastic its texture, colors, and capabilities, additives like pigments, heat stabilizers, and flame retardants are added. And when many plastics are melted together, polymers get mixed with their multiple additives, which results in a material with lower quality. As such, less than 10% of plastic is mechanically recycled more than once, and recycled plastic usually also contains virgin resin to make up for the dip in quality.

Whereas in PDK plastics, the resin polymers are engineered to easily break down into monomers when mixed with an acid, after which monomers can be separated from any additives and gathered to make new plastics without any loss of quality. The team’s earlier research shows that this “chemical recycling” process is light on energy and carbon dioxide emissions, and it can be repeated indefinitely, creating a completely circular material lifecycle where there is currently a one-way ticket to waste.

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