Chin Mason T, Diao Tianning
Department of Chemistry, New York University, 100 Washington Square East, New York, New York 10003, United States.
ACS Catal. 2024 Aug 5;14(16):12437-12453. doi: 10.1021/acscatal.4c03194. eCollection 2024 Aug 16.
Synthetic polymers play an indispensable role in modern society, finding applications across various sectors ranging from packaging, textiles, and consumer products to construction, electronics, and industrial machinery. Commodity plastics are cheap to produce, widely available, and versatile to meet diverse application needs. As a result, millions of metric tons of plastics are manufactured annually. However, current approaches for the chemical recycling of postconsumer plastic waste, primarily based on pyrolysis, lag in efficiency compared to their production methods. In recent years, significant research has focused on developing milder, economically viable methods for the chemical recycling of commodity plastics, which involves converting plastic waste back into monomers or transforming it into other valuable chemicals. This Perspective examines both industrial and cutting-edge laboratory-scale methods contributing to recent advancements in the field of chemical recycling.
合成聚合物在现代社会中发挥着不可或缺的作用，其应用涵盖了从包装、纺织品、消费品到建筑、电子和工业机械等各个领域。通用塑料生产成本低廉、供应广泛且用途多样，能够满足各种不同的应用需求。因此，每年都会生产数百万吨塑料。然而，目前用于消费后塑料废弃物化学回收的方法，主要基于热解，与塑料生产方法相比，效率较低。近年来，大量研究集中在开发更温和、经济上可行的通用塑料化学回收方法，即将塑料废弃物转化回单体或转化为其他有价值的化学品。本综述探讨了推动化学回收领域近期进展的工业方法和前沿实验室规模方法。
