Only about 10% of the plastic ever made has been recycled; the vast majority winds up in landfills or in the environment.
Researchers have been working to address the problem by coming up with new recycling methods, sometimes called advanced, or chemical, recycling. My colleague Sarah Ward recently wrote about one new study where researchers used a chemical process to recycle mixed-fiber clothing containing polyester, a common plastic.
One major challenge for traditional recycling is that it requires careful sorting. That’s possible (if difficult) for some situations—humans or machines can separate milk jugs from soda bottles from takeout containers. But when it comes to other products, it becomes nearly impossible to sort out their components.
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In the study Sarah wrote about, scientists demonstrated a process that can recycle a fabric made from a blend of cotton and polyester. It uses a solvent to break the chemical bonds in polyester in around 15 minutes, leaving other materials mostly intact.
If this could work quickly and at large scale, it might someday allow facilities to dissolve polyester from blended textiles, separating it from other fibers and in theory allowing each component to be reused in future products.
