Researchers find ‘Holy Grail’ of fully recyclable plastic

Recyclable plastic isn’t quite as recyclable as you’d think, with products typically ‘downcycled’, so that, for instance, a bottle becomes textiles for carpeting.

But a team of researchers at Berkeley Lab might just have changed that – with a find described as the‘Holy Grail’, a plastic which can be recycled into dozens of different materials, again and again.

Like Lego, ‘PDK’ can be disassembled into its constituent parts at the molecular level, and then reassembled into a different shape, texture, and color again and again.

It could be a world-changing discovery.

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Even the most recyclable plastic, PET is only recycled at a rate of 20-30%, with the rest typically going to incinerators or landfills, where the carbon-rich material takes centuries to decompose.

“Most plastics were never made to be recycled,” said lead author Peter Christensen, a postdoctoral researcher at Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry.

“But we have discovered a new way to assemble plastics that takes recycling into consideration from a molecular perspective.”

The new material, called poly(diketoenamine), or PDK, was reported in the journal Nature Chemistry.

The chemical building blocks – monomers – of PDK plastic could be recovered and freed from any compounded additives simply by dunking the material in a highly acidic solution.