Plastic pollution is one of the major environmental issues that currently affect our planet. Every year, it is estimated that more than 8 million tons of plastic waste end up in the oceans, causing serious harm to marine life. At the University of California (UC) Santa Barbara, a new study was conducted by a team of researchers where plastic waste was converted into a raw material for detergents.
Repurposed Waste Materials
Scientists reimagined the use of single-use plastics and focused on improving a process that turns polyolefins, the most common type of polymer in single-use packaging, into valuable alkylaromatics. Alkylaromatics are the molecules that underlie surfactants which are the main ingredient in making detergents and other useful substances.
The research team built on previous work, initially launching a method of breaking the solid carbon-carbon bonds in plastic and rearranging the molecular chains into alkylaromatic rings. The original process based on a platinum-on-alumina catalyst was effective but slow and had a low yield of alkylaromatic molecules.
According to UCSB's chemical engineering professor Susannah Scott, they made it better this time by increasing the acidity of the original alumina catalyst by adding chlorine or fluorine. The added acid sites allowed them to boost the speed and selectivity of the process.
Aside from this, their one-pot process operates at moderate temperatures, which require low energy input. The original method took 24 hours to convert plastic into alkylaromatic molecules, but the improved process completed the task within a couple of hours. This increases the amount of plastic that can be transformed into a reasonably sized reactor.
The researchers are confident that this method can become a viable commercial process to recover single-use plastics. Using plastic wastes as a highly abundant raw material, chemical manufacturers can take the alkylaromatic molecules from this process and convert them into surfactants for formulating cleansers, soaps, dishwashing liquids, and other detergents.
This breakthrough does not only have the potential to reduce the amount of plastic waste that ends up in landfills and oceans, but it can also have a great impact on the detergent industry. Using plastic waste as a raw material, detergent manufacturers can lessen their reliance on fossil fuels and other non-renewable resources, thus, reducing their carbon footprint.
How Do Surfactants Work?
Surfactants refer to chemical compounds that decrease the surface tension of water. Also known as surface active agents, they are used in various cleaning products that can remove oil and grease from different surfaces and materials.
As amphiphilic molecules, surfactants are absorbed in the air-water interface. They contain a hydrophobic (water-hating) tail and a hydrophilic (water-loving) head. At the interface, they align themselves so that the tail is exposed to air while the head is in water, reducing surface or interfacial tensions.
When a solution contains enough surfactant, the molecules combine to form micelles. These structures work as a unit where the soils are surrounded by the hydrophobic tails and are pulled off the surface by the hydrophilic heads and into the cleaning solution.
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