Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Pesticide Sciences, Department of Chemistry, College of Sciences, Nanjing Agricultural University, Nanjing 210095, China.
College of Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical Engineering, State Key Laboratory of Materials-Oriented Chemical Engineering, Nanjing Tech University, Nanjing 211800, China.
Nano Lett. 2024 Aug 7;24(31):9768-9775. doi: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.4c02966. Epub 2024 Jul 26.
Excessive production of waste polyethylene terephthalate (PET) poses an ecological challenge, which necessitates developing technologies to extract the values from end-of-life PET. Upcycling has proven effective in addressing the low profitability of current recycling strategies, yet existing upcycling technologies operate under energy-intensive conditions. Here we report a cascade strategy to steer the transformation of PET waste into glycolate in an overall yield of 92.6% under ambient conditions. The cascade approach involves setting up a robust hydrolase with 95.6% PET depolymerization into ethylene glycol (EG) monomer within 12 h, followed by an electrochemical process initiated by a CO-tolerant Pd/Ni(OH) catalyst to convert the EG intermediate into glycolate with high Faradaic efficiency of 97.5%. Techno-economic analysis and life cycle assessment indicate that, compared with the widely adopted electrochemical technology that heavily relies on alkaline pretreatment for PET depolymerization, our designed enzymatic-electrochemical approach offers a cost-effective and low-carbon pathway to upgrade PET.
过量生产的废聚对苯二甲酸乙二醇酯（PET）造成了生态挑战，这就需要开发从废 PET 中提取价值的技术。升级再造已被证明可以有效解决当前回收策略盈利能力低的问题，但现有的升级再造技术在能源密集型条件下运行。在这里，我们报告了一种级联策略，可在环境条件下将 PET 废物转化为 92.6%收率的乙醇酸。级联方法包括建立一种稳健的水解酶，在 12 小时内将 95.6%的 PET 解聚成乙二醇（EG）单体，然后通过 CO 耐受的 Pd/Ni(OH)催化剂引发电化学过程，将 EG 中间体转化为高法拉第效率为 97.5%的乙醇酸。技术经济分析和生命周期评估表明，与广泛采用的严重依赖碱性预处理进行 PET 解聚的电化学技术相比，我们设计的酶-电化学方法为升级 PET 提供了一种具有成本效益和低碳的途径。
