A new chemical process can essentially vaporize plastics that dominate the waste stream today and turn them into hydrocarbon building blocks for new plastics. The catalytic process, developed at the ...

What if we could help the global plastic waste problem and the transportation industry with the same technology? A team of scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames National Laboratory is ...

Plastic bottles and bags can be vaporised into chemical building blocks and turned into new plastics with all the properties of virgin material. There are hurdles still to overcome, but the new ...

One reason plastic waste persists in the environment is because there’s not much that can eat it. The chemical structure of most polymers is stable and different enough from existing food sources that ...

The common material is a growing source of emissions, but a combination of technology and policy could help clean it up. This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate ...

Attempts in the past have tried adding plastic scrap to traditional building products, but shredding the material and dumping it into concrete or asphalt does not work in most applications because ...

Scientists have long known that sunlight helps break down plastic. So, why do plastic products linger for decades and even centuries in rivers, lakes, and oceans—even when bathed in direct sunlight?

Graduate student RJ Conk adjusts a reaction chamber in which mixed plastics are degraded into the reusable building blocks of new polymers. A new chemical process can essentially vaporize plastics ...