Yogurt pots, shampoo bottles, coffee-to-go lids, bubble wrap \u2014\u00a0plastic products are all composed of the same building blocks: long carbon chains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Heating them to high temperatures makes the carbon chains crack into a mixture of shorter molecules, ultimately converting them back into\u00a0crude oil, <\/a>the resource from which the majority of plastic products were originally made.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Varying the process can result in different carbon chain lengths and therefore different carbon-based products, ranging from fuels such as diesel and kerosene to petroleum naphtha, a valuable liquid for the chemical industry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This potential mode of recycling \u2014 where plastic is broken down into its original components \u2014 has been becoming increasingly popular in industry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s known as ‘chemical recycling,’ as opposed to ‘mechanical recycling’ \u2014 the chop-and-wash-method in which plastic is sorted by type, ground into powders, mixed and melted into the very same kind of polymers from which the powders were generated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Chemical recycling has emerged as a major topic [in industry], mainly out of helplessness of how to proceed in mechanical recycling,” says Thomas Fischer, head of the recycling management division with the non-profit environmental association Deutsche Umwelthilfe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A prerequisite for mechanical recycling, he says, is making plastic that is actually recyclable. “That requires a lot of know-how, such as which dyestuffs and additives can be used and which cannot.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n