Researchers from Swansea University in the UK announced that they have found a way to turn plastic – that most ubiquitous and troublesome waste material – into hydrogen gas that can be used to propel fuel cell vehicles.

Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) is the most common plastic material that makes up everyday products, such as beverage bottles on shelves of convenience stores and supermarkets. Although PET-based products are recyclable, most of them tend to end up in landfills or incinerators.

One rather demoralizing reason as to why people are inclined to throw used or unwanted plastic items into trash bins instead of recycling bins is that these items have to be sorted and thoroughly cleaned before they are further broken down into pellets or hydrocarbon compounds. In the case of PET, the standard recycling procedure only accepts items that are composed entirely of that material as well as being free of grease and other contaminants. Even with an automated process, sorting and washing PET containers can be costly and time-consuming. Recycled plastic is also of a lower grade in quality compared with virgin plastic.

The goal of research team at Swansea University is to devise a simplified recycling process that is applicable to all types of plastic materials, not just PET. Dr. Moritz Kuehnel of the university’s chemistry department told news media that the current industry practice only allows a small portion of discarded plastic items to be used again within a narrow range of applications. The key solution is therefore to develop a recycling process that produces one or more base materials that can be used in many areas. The breakthrough came to the research team when they combined plastic wastes with a light-absorbing material and an alkaline solution. This mixture was then exposed under sunlight. As if by magic, the resulting chemical reaction created hydrogen gas, carbon dioxide gas, and the basic ingredients of plastic.

The “beauty” of this method developed by the Swansea team, as Kuehnel emphasized, is that it is not “picky” and can break down many different types of plastic materials within the same batch and at the same time. Furthermore, impurities such as grease and foodstuff will not hinder the chemical reaction but rather facilitate it.

Kuehnel said it will still take several more years of hard work in order to scale up this process to an industrial level. However, the increasing urgency of dealing with growing heaps of plastic wastes worldwide may compel the adoption of Swansea’s solution sooner than expected as an alternative to the standard recycling procedure.

 (This article is an English translation of news content provided by EnergyTrend’s media partner TechNews. The credit of the photo at the top of the article goes to Pixabay.)