World free from plastic| Different new plastic recycle technique

Aman Bajpai

Research Scholar

IIT Gandhinagar

It feels good when you put plastic in that blue bin right. It gives us a certain sense of accomplishment when we separately discard plastic bags, soda bottles from the rest of the garbage. What do you think this will help in keeping our land and the oceans free from plastic, right?

Wrong. No matter how well you are discard your plastics, most of them end up in the trash heap.

You know why because these plastic waste are composed of several layers of different kinds of plastics and each plastic has to be recycled separately. For example, if we take a detergent jug, it’s body is made up of polyethylene and its cap is made up of polypropylene. If you melt those down, and try to make a bottle out of that, it would not be a durable bottle, it will crack down on squeezing. Most plastics are like oil and water. They just don’t mix and so make it too difficult to recycle them.

Recycling plastic is a big issue because we can now find plastic waste everywhere from the top of Mount Everest to the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

What is the solution to this problem? Do you think we can switch plastic with some biodegradable material like cellulose plastic? maybe but I don’t think so because the plastic products manufactured with them are not as strong and cheap as plastic.

Here in this video, we have bought for you some latest advancements in recycling plastic with high efficiency.

Number 1

Solvent wash method

This process uses a series of different liquid solvents to dissolve individual plastic components off a product. Using the solubility of different kinds of plastic in different solvents Huber and his colleagues have designed this strategy. Here the idea is to choose the right solvents to dissolve only one kind of plastic at a time. They tested tested this technique on a packaging film that contained polyethylene and PET, as well as some amount of ethylene vinyl alcohol, that keeps food fresh.

They stirred the film into a toluene solvent first which dissolved the polyethylene layer now one component is dissolved which they have separated from the mixture, the remaining ones are PET and ethylene vinyl alcohol which they dissolved in a solvent called dimethyl sulphoxide DMSO which dissolved the ethylene vinyl alcohol, the remaining PET film was then recovered. So by this method, they were able to successfully separate different kinds of plastics which is almost impossible to separate by any other technique.

What an innovative and simple idea. That’s why I love science. Moving on to the next method

Second method

Using mutated bacteria

Before talking about this method let’s understand what is mutated bacterial enzyme. A mutation is any change in a DNA sequence in bacteria that can be induced artificially in lab. By inducing mutations in bacteria, scientists can change the function and the characteristics of bacterias.

Researchers have reported that they have engineered an enzyme that can convert 90% of that same plastic back to its original starting materials. The enzyme which they used has originally discovered in a compost heap of leaves, the scientists chosen this after screening 100,000 micro-organisms enzyme. They introduced some form of mutations in them to improve its ability to break down the PET plastic from which drinks bottles are made. They also designed them in such away so that they can remain stable even at 72C, which is perfect temperature for fast degradation.

The team of scientists observed that they can break down a tons of plastics waste up to 90% efficiency in just 10 hours.

The best part is the cost of the enzyme was just 4% of the cost of virgin plastic made from oil.

This technique will give a massive boost to plastic recycling because Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) is one of the world’s most commonly used plastics, with around 70 million tons produced annually. All the current approach for recycling this plastic end up with lots of problems one such problem is the plastic which they get after recycling is a broad mixed color plastic which very few companies want to use to pack their products. Now with the help of these mutated bacterias we can convert 90% of that plastic back to its original starting form.

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