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"Plastic can take hundreds of years to degrade, so bottles and bags can be a danger to wildlife, strangling birds, mammals and fish, and soaking up toxic chemicals from seawater that can poison any creatures that swallow them.
What's more, plastic is expensive to recycle and requires a significant energy outlay, particularly in sorting and separating the different polymers that may be present.
Mixed plastic
Now Vilas Ganpat Pol at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois has developed a technique to convert a mixture of waste plastics into micro-spheres of a form of carbon called carbon black. The micro-spheres can be used in paints, lubricants and tyres, and even incorporated into the anodes of lithium-ion batteries.
To create the spheres, Pol melted a mixture of plastics in a reactor at 700 °C. At this temperature, the pressure in the reactor reaches 34 atmospheres, helping to break down the bonds between the hydrogen and carbon atoms in the polymer chains. The hydrogen gas is siphoned off, leaving behind carbon micro-spheres up to 10 micrometres in diameter.
More at: Green machine: Tackling the plastic menace - tech - 28 June 2010 - New Scientist
What's more, plastic is expensive to recycle and requires a significant energy outlay, particularly in sorting and separating the different polymers that may be present.
Mixed plastic
Now Vilas Ganpat Pol at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois has developed a technique to convert a mixture of waste plastics into micro-spheres of a form of carbon called carbon black. The micro-spheres can be used in paints, lubricants and tyres, and even incorporated into the anodes of lithium-ion batteries.
To create the spheres, Pol melted a mixture of plastics in a reactor at 700 °C. At this temperature, the pressure in the reactor reaches 34 atmospheres, helping to break down the bonds between the hydrogen and carbon atoms in the polymer chains. The hydrogen gas is siphoned off, leaving behind carbon micro-spheres up to 10 micrometres in diameter.
More at: Green machine: Tackling the plastic menace - tech - 28 June 2010 - New Scientist