Author: Laurel Hamers / Source: Science News for Students
A new kind of plastic can break down into the same building blocks from which it was made. Like a child’s plastic Lego bricks, the molecular blocks can link and detach again and again, a new study finds.
And the material is more durable than earlier plastics designed to be recycled more than once.Maybe you’ve learned to throw plastic bottles and containers into a recycling bin rather than the trash. News flash: Today, only about 10 percent of plastic ever gets recycled. That’s according to a 2017 study in Science Advances. Most of the rest lingers in landfills or ends up floating in the ocean. But plastic is so cheap and useful that hundreds of millions of tons more of it are made each year.
Even plastic that does get recycled will likely reach the landfill before long. That’s because most plastics today don’t turn back into their starting material. Instead, they break down into molecules that can’t be reused right away. Rather than pulling a Lego creation apart into its starting blocks, it might be more like smashing the structure into bits.
Transforming those bits, now, into something useable can take many chemical reactions. All that extra processing uses time, water and energy. Those steps make recycling not very efficient. And few recycled plastics are remade into the same type of object they were before. Instead, most get turned into items such as carpet, car parts and park benches — things that themselves are hard to recycle. But a plastic that could easily break down into its building blocks and be reused over and…
The post This plastic can be recycled over and over and over appeared first on FeedBox.