The growing concern related to plastic waste has led to a search for sustainable solutions among these, the concept of a circular economy is gaining considerable momentum. In a circular economy, the pathway shifts from the traditional linear model of ‘take, make, dispose’ to one where materials are kept in use for as long as possible, extracting maximum value, and then recovering and regenerating products at the end of their lives. At the heart of this vision, many would regard it as one of the most serious environmental issues of our time, namely, the effective recycling of plastic waste. Catalysis could contribute significantly to the circular economy by providing effective, economical, and environmentally clean recycling processes by enhancing the chemical reactions. This paper discusses how catalytic processes are changing the way plastic waste is being recycled into high-quality recyclable products, especially polyethylene terephthalate (PET).
Challenge of Plastic Waste
Plastics have become a part of modern life because they are durable, lightweight, and versatile. However, these very properties have now led to the problem of plastic waste, which creates huge environmental hazards. These properties make mechanical recycling, among other traditional recycling processes, degrade mostly in the quality of the plastics, and hence they are rather limited for recycling, with a resultant continuous demand for virgin plastic materials. Moreover, plastics, and multilayer packaging in particular, are pretty hard to recycle with traditional processes. In this view, huge amounts of plastic waste are incinerated or landfilled. This fact points out a requirement for more advanced recycling technologies that will be able to process a diversity of plastic waste streams without losing the quality of the recycled products.
Catalysis in Plastic Recycling
One of the most potential solutions to the drawbacks of traditional recycling processes is catalysis. These catalytic processes enable the chemical recycling of plastics through the breakdown into monomeric building blocks that, after purification, could be re-polymerized into new plastics displaying properties identical to virgin material. This process not only reduces the need for new plastic production but also ensures that plastics can be recycled multiple times without loss of quality, thus ideally fitting into the framework of a circular economy.