They’re tenacious, which is very good for a milk jug or a car bumper. But they don’t easily break down, which is bad for the environment. From the 1950s, when plastics were first produced in ...

Graduate student RJ Conk adjusts a reaction chamber in which mixed plastics are degraded into the reusable building blocks of new polymers. A new chemical process can essentially vaporize plastics ...

One reason plastic waste persists in the environment is because there’s not much that can eat it. The chemical structure of most polymers is stable and different enough from existing food sources that ...

A team of chemists is pioneering a new approach to creating plastics made from whole-cell algae and common chemical components. These biohybrid plastics are strong, highly adaptable, and fully ...

Getting microbes to eat plastic is a frequently touted solution to our growing waste problem, but making the approach practical is tricky. A new technique that impregnates plastic with the spores of ...

The world is miserable at recycling plastics. Currently, just 10–15% of the plastic waste we generate annually is recycled — with the rest incinerated, buried in landfill or dumped as litter 1, 2. A ...

What if we could help the global plastic waste problem and the transportation industry with the same technology? A team of scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames National Laboratory are ...

Gamini Mendis, assistant professor of plastics engineering technology, in the plastics lab at Penn State University's Behrend campus. A company planning to build a huge plastics recycling facility in ...