Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder have achieved a major breakthrough in plastic recycling, using electricity and chemical reactions to break down bottles and other packaging.
Human TL;DR- they’re breaking ester bonds in PET via hydrolysis into it’s base components. Theoretically they’d be easier to separate at that stage and reform into brand new PET. But it’s only in lab reactors, not scalable, and most likely excessively energy intensive for the total material processed (as electrolysis almost always is), and such is a fluff article
Human TL;DR- they’re breaking ester bonds in PET via hydrolysis into it’s base components. Theoretically they’d be easier to separate at that stage and reform into brand new PET. But it’s only in lab reactors, not scalable, and most likely excessively energy intensive for the total material processed (as electrolysis almost always is), and such is a fluff article