This startling mechanism for promoting depolymerization relies on an additive that many plastics already contain: a pigment called carbon black that gives plastic its black color. Through a process called photothermal conversion, intense light is focused on plastic containing the pigment to jumpstart the degradation.
The lab's method has since been tried out on such post-consumer waste as PVC pipes, black construction pipes, trash bags, credit cards, even those ubiquitous yellow rubber duckies. It works on all of them.
So far, researchers have shown that carbon black can depolymerize polystyrene and polyvinyl chloride , two of the least recycled plastics in the planet's waste stream. Through a process called photothermal conversion, intense light is focused on plastic containing the pigment that jumpstarts the degradation.
"The surprising thing, especially with the black polystyrene depolymerization, is that they've been manufacturing these materials for decades and it seems no one recognized that this was possible," said Stache."Under ambient sunlight, the energy is not sufficient to break down these polymers. But if you increase the light intensity enough, then you start seeing the depolymerization.
"Carbon black absorbs all the way from UV to IR, and that's great because what we want is for this agent to take as much light as possible and transform light into heat." "We used carbon black to initiate the thermal degradation of PVC, generate HCl with an acceptor for HCl that reacts to make an adduct," Stache explained."So you can basically access a new commodity chemical from the process. We take advantage of what is normally a bad process -- the HCl -- and add it to another commodity chemical, and then we get a new product."was authored by Sewon Oh, Hanning Jiang, Liat Kugelmass, and Erin Stache and appeared in the Nov.
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