A professor at Boise State University has succeeded in producing and commercializing a new plastic polymer that offers resilience and recyclability, opening up a pathway for closed-loop recycling.
Scott Phillips is a professor at the university’s Micron School of Materials Science and Engineering, and after 15 years of research, he managed to create a new plastic polymer that can be broken down into its original state for successful reuse, according to a Boise State University report.
“Modern plastic recycling processes often use heat and mechanical force to recycle an item, which ends up breaking some of the polymers, and as polymers get shorter, the mechanical properties — the strength, flexibility, recyclability, and so forth — of the resulting plastic that you want to make gets diminished,” Phillips said…