The time may be coming to wash our hands of plastic trash. Literally.
Now, there’s a way to turn old plastic into surfactants, researchers report in the Aug. 10 Science. Surfactants make up the key ingredients in dozens of products like lubricants, ski wax, detergents and soap.
“To me, plastic waste basically [is] aboveground crude oil,” says chemist Guoliang Liu of Viginia Tech in Blacksburg. “We don’t have to go deep into the ocean or underground to mine [it] anymore” to make valuable chemicals.
Surfactants and the two most used kinds of plastic, polyethylene and polypropylene, are made of molecular chains of carbon atoms. But surfactants’ chains are far shorter than those of plastics and are capped with groups of water-attracting atoms.
2023-08-28 07:00:00
Link from www.sciencenews.org