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Complete hydrogenolysis of mixed plastic wastes

Nature Chemical Engineering (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

The accumulation of plastic waste in the environment has led to a global crisis with severe consequences for wildlife and ecosystems. Upcycling offers a promising solution for reducing plastic waste by converting it into valuable chemicals and fuels. Real-life plastic waste exists as complex mixtures of different types of plastic, which poses a key challenge for efficient upcycling. Here, by using sunlight as the sole energy source, we report a thermocatalytic approach for transforming a plastic waste mixture collected from daily usage into methane and HCl using an earth-abundant Ni-based catalyst. This process successfully converted 1.03 g of a plastic waste mixture, containing five types of polyolefin, polyester and polyvinyl chloride, into 1.08 g of methane (yieldC 98%) and 0.045 g of HCl (yieldCl 91%). Catalyst deactivation caused by chlorine poisoning is prevented through the temperature-ramped process driven by the diurnal sunlight cycle, ensuring sustained catalytic activity over a period of 10 days.

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Fig. 1: Illustration of the sunlight-driven catalytic system for complete hydrogenolysis of plastic waste.
Fig. 2: Catalytic performance on the hydrogenolysis of plastics and ethane.
Fig. 3: Catalytic transformation of plastics by sunlight-driven, temperature-programmed and constant-temperature processes.
Fig. 4: The mass spectra of the temperature-programmed catalytic hydrogenolysis of different plastics.

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Acknowledgements

This work received financial support by National Key R&D Program of China (2022YFE0114900 and 2021YFA1501102), National Natural Science Foundation of China (22232001, 21932002, 22072002 and 22378094), China National Petroleum Corporation-Peking University Strategic Cooperation Project of Fundamental Research, and New Cornerstone Science Foundation. We also acknowledge R. Mi, M. Zhang, T. Wang, Z. Guo, Y. Jiao, R. Cao and S. Tian for help with experimental setup and analysis. D.M. acknowledges support from the Tencent Foundation through the XPLORER PRIZE.

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Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Meng Wang, Yongjun Gao, Shaoyu Yuan, Jin Deng.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences, New Cornerstone Science Laboratory, College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, Peking University, Beijing, China

    Meng Wang, Jie Yan, Shixiang Yu, Bingjun Xu & Ding Ma

  2. College of Chemistry and Materials Science, Hebei University, Baoding, China

    Yongjun Gao & Shaoyu Yuan

  3. CAS Key Laboratory of Urban Pollutant Conversion, Anhui Province Key Laboratory of Biomass Clean Energy, Department of Applied Chemistry, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China

    Jin Deng & Jie Yang

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Contributions

D.M. conceived the project. Y.G., M.W., S. Yuan, J.Y. and S. Yu performed most of the reactions. J.D. and J.Y. did the LCA and TEA analysis. M.W., Y.G., B.X. and D.M. wrote the paper. All authors contributed to the discussion and revision of the paper.

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Correspondence to Ding Ma.

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Nature Chemical Engineering thanks Huiyan Zhang, Massimiliano Delferro and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Wang, M., Gao, Y., Yuan, S. et al. Complete hydrogenolysis of mixed plastic wastes. Nat Chem Eng (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44286-024-00064-y

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