Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder have achieved a major breakthrough in plastic recycling, using electricity and chemical reactions to break down bottles and other packaging.
Yeah. The issue has never been actually doing it, because chemistry is chemistry and all chemical bonds can be broken- it’s the economic viability, because breaking chemical bonds in hydrocarbon polymers is incredibly energy intensive. Energy that, up until now, would have also been coming from petroleum or fossil fuels, so you’d end up with a net negative. Thermodynamics hates an engineer’s guts and makes his life hard.
However those economics might certainly be changing as oil supplies gradually tighten and extremely cheap peak solar electricity becomes much more plentiful. Once midday electricity becomes an almost waste and the energy is cheap, the economics of processing becomes a lot more attractive.
Yeah. The issue has never been actually doing it, because chemistry is chemistry and all chemical bonds can be broken- it’s the economic viability, because breaking chemical bonds in hydrocarbon polymers is incredibly energy intensive. Energy that, up until now, would have also been coming from petroleum or fossil fuels, so you’d end up with a net negative. Thermodynamics hates an engineer’s guts and makes his life hard.
However those economics might certainly be changing as oil supplies gradually tighten and extremely cheap peak solar electricity becomes much more plentiful. Once midday electricity becomes an almost waste and the energy is cheap, the economics of processing becomes a lot more attractive.
That is a good point on energy costs. Cheap solar energy is going to change the dynamics to a lot of things.