(332g) Transforming Plastic Waste into Microporous Adsorbents for Environmental Remediation

By 2050 plastics will outweigh fish if 8 million tonnes of plastics continue to flow into oceans each year and damage marine ecosystems at an annual cost of ∼ £9.9 bn. This can be overcome with better plastic recycling technologies. Existing plastic recycling methods are focused on energy-intensive mechanical and chemical methods. In this work, we employed the facile method of solvent-recycling to transform plastic waste into microporous materials with high specific surface areas of up to 1000 m²/g. The specific surface areas and morphologies of these microporous recyclates could be tailored to suit various environmental remediation applications using different combinations of reaction conditions such as reagent type, ratios and temperature, benefitting carbon capture, dye removal and inorganic toxicants sequestration from water. The adsorption capacities of these recyclate materials were comparable to state-of-the-art nanomaterials such as metal organic frameworks (MOFs), polymers synthesized from expensive fine substrates and commercial adsorbents. Our approach simultaneously benefits the living environment by tackling plastic pollution via the transformation of plastic waste into adsorbents that can potentially be employed to sequester a variety of environmental pollutants – greenhouse gases, organic and inorganic molecules.