How to turn waste polyethylene into something useful
Break it up into propylene, and make new plastic out of it
Creating plastics by linking small molecules, known as monomers, together to make large ones, known as polymers, was one of the triumphs of 20th-century chemistry—and no polymer was more triumphant than polyethylene. Even today, more than 80 years after its first industrial production, polyethylene and its cousin polypropylene together constitute more than a third of the plastics produced each year.
This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “Making the break”
From the October 1st 2022 edition
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