Putting that soda bottle or takeout container in the recycling bin is no guarantee that it will be recycled.
Rice University scientists are attempting to address this issue by making the process profitable.
From plastic waste to valuable nanomaterials
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According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the amount of plastic waste produced globally has doubled in the last two decades, and plastic production is expected to triple by 2050, with the majority of it ending up in landfills, incinerated, or otherwise mismanaged.
According to some estimates, only 5% of waste is recycled.
Waste plastic is rarely recycled because it costs a lot of money to do all of the washing, sorting, and melting down of the plastics to turn it into a material that a factory can use, according to Kevin Wyss, a Rice graduate student and lead author on a study published in Advanced Materials that describes how he and colleagues in chemist James Tour's lab used their flash Joule heating technique to turn plastic into valuable carbon nanotubes and hybrid nanomaterials.
Graphene, carbon nanotubes, and other carbon-based nanomaterials are generally strong and chemically resistant, have a low density and a large surface area, and are capable of conductivity and broad electromagnetic absorption.
As a result, they can be used in a wide range of industrial, medical, and electronics applications, including composites, coatings, sensors, electrochemical energy storage, and many others.
The fact that we were able to make carbon nanotubes with bits of graphene attached to the ends was particularly intriguing, according to Wyss.
This new hybrid nanomaterial's structure is similar to that of bean sprouts or lollipops.
These are normally extremely difficult to create, and the fact that we were able to create them from waste plastic is truly remarkable.
The plastic, which does not have to be sorted or washed like traditional recycling, is "flashed" at temperatures above 3,100 degrees Celsius (about 5,120 degrees Fahrenheit).
"All we do is grind the material into small, confetti-sized pieces, mix in a small amount of a different carbon, say, charcoal for conductivity," Wyss explained, as per ScienceDaily.
Recycling plastic is more expensive than producing new plastic, so there is the little economic incentive to recycle plastic.
That's why we turned to upcycling, which is the process of converting low-value waste materials into something with a higher monetary or use value.
If we can convert waste plastic into something more valuable, people will be able to profit from being responsible for how they dispose of discarded plastics.
Plastic is a cheap and long-lasting material that can be found in a variety of products ranging from packaging materials to plastic bottles, straws to plastic bags, and much more, as per the City of Westminster.
The cycle of producing and disposing of plastic will continue until businesses start using more environmentally friendly, alternative materials (such as paper).
Simply put, the more people there are in the world, the greater the demand for low-cost materials, and thus the more plastic we use in excess.
To illustrate, due to rapid urbanization and, consequently, demand, more plastic was produced in the first decade of this century than ever before.
Plastic is made up of chemical bonds that are strong and long-lasting.
The rate of decomposition of plastic varies depending on the type, but it typically ranges from 50 to 600 years.
In other words, almost every piece of plastic ever made and sent to landfill or dumped in the environment still exists, according to the US EPA (Environmental Protection Agency in the United States) - a sobering thought for us all.
The cycle continues as new plastic items are manufactured every day.
