The majority of plastic waste is landfilled, burned or leaks to the environment. Unfortunately, only 12 % (by weight) is recycled globally, mainly because the predominantly applied recycling technique of melting and re-extrusion produces a lower quality plastic.
Therefore, chemical depolymerization of plastic has been studied to produce monomers which can be used to make high-quality plastic again. For polyolefins, however, only a very mixed, low value hydrocarbon stream was obtained thus far. This is because thermal cracking of the strong polyolefin bonds evokes random bond scission, uncontrolled further reaction and thus the formation of various products besides monomers.
The team around Principal Investigator Dr. Ina Vollmer focusses on developing pathways for the low temperature, selective chemical recycling of plastic waste to chemical building blocks like aromatics, carboxylic acids and monomers. We are especially interested in using mechano-catalysis to drive the depolymerization of polymers.
