Several hindrances to the recycling of synthetic polymers, including material separation and post-treatment degradation of the macromolecular polymer chains, negatively affect the cost-efficiency and ...

Plastics, by and large, are well-understood materials. Not as strong as most metals, but often much lighter, these man-made polymers have found innumerable applications that have revolutionized the ...

Polymers are versatile materials, of which plastics are perhaps the most well known examples. Under a microscope, polymers usually look like squiggly threads, one-dimensional chains of units called ...

Researchers have succeeded in breaking down plastic into its molecular building blocks and in recovering over 90 percent of them -- a first step towards genuine plastic recycling. A team of ETH ...

Redirecting plastic lifecycles from linear to circular economic models is one of the grand challenges in modern material science. Responding to that challenge, researchers from the University of ...