New research offers a potential to recycle plastic without material degradation

For a long time, biochemists, environmentalists, recycling experts and other have been working on ways to recycle plastic. With the amount of plastic being used - and, eventually, discarded - in the modern world the impetus for this kind of exploration is fully understandable - both from an environmental perspective and from a commercial one as a viable recycling technology could literally enable one to produce a valuable product from refuse as opposed to mineral source materials. But there was one fundamental problem: the quality of recycled plastic was consistently lower than that of the source material, i.e, the plastic being recycled.

But this obstacle may now be a thing of the past. Team of scientists at the University of Colorado at Boulder in the US have discovered a novel recycling technology that allows plastic, especially hard plastic, to be built into basic short building blocks to be reassembled into new plastic according to specifications. That may make it possible to effectively recycle plastic indefinitely.

References

Scientists finally find a way to recycle plastic indefinitely
Tibi Puiu, ZME Science, 26 September 2022

Recyclable and malleable thermosets enabled by activating dormant dynamic linkages
Zepeng Lei, Hongxuan Chen, Chaoqian Luo, Yicheng Rong, Yiming Hu, Yinghua Jin, Rong Long, Kai Yu & Wei Zhang, Nature Chemistry, 26 September 2022