Our plastic waste can be used as raw material for detergents, thanks to an improved catalytic method
But, for researchers at UC Santa Barbara, one person’s single-use packaging is another person’s useful raw material. In a paper published in the journal Chem, they have reimagined the value of single-use plastics, with improvements to an innovative process that can turn polyolefins, the most common type of polymer in single-use packaging, into valuable alkylaromatics — molecules that underlie surfactants, the active components of detergents and other useful chemicals.
