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this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2026
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Hydrogen
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Hmm...
Sodium hydroxide (NaOH) is caustic soda or lye, which is fairly cheap and reasonably safe to handle, so that's not really an issue. Possibly this process could be done safely at home, though it might only be cost effective in high volume.
So that's hot enough to melt lead. It could be done in a garage but it's probably more than most people would want deal with regularly.
It does sound like this is a refinement of an already understood process, which suggests that it was not efficient enough before for anyone to bother developing into a practical recycling system. Maybe this changes that calculation?
They are measuring the output hydrogen in millimoles per gram, which means there's not much hydrogen being produced. Hydrogen is ~1 g/mol, so at an average output of 40 mmol/g, only about 4% of the plastic mass is being extracted as hydrogen and 96% of the mass is left behind as waste material. That doesn't seem super helpful with the plastic waste volume problem.
The market price of hydrogen in the US right now is USD$1145 per metric ton, so 40 mg of hydrogen is worth about $0.000046.
That's a lot of zeroes, and not in a good way. You would need to process a lot of material to gain any value from this. A real cost/benefit would depend on how cheaply the machine that does the processing can be run, and how much you have to pay to have plastic waste shipped to you (and washed pretty thoroughly, I'd guess - any crud on the plastic would end up as waste gunk you'd have to clean out of your processing machine). And then you'd still have to dispose of 96% of the leftover mass through some other means.
My guess is that the value of the recovered hydrogen would not be enough to equal even the cost of the energy input required to heat the plastic during the process, and never mind the rest of the associated costs. If it needs more energy to process than it can produce, it's not very "green", you're just expending some other energy source to do this. Considering that it doesn't really reduce much of the waste volume either, this doesn't seem worthwhile. We can probably spend resources more effectively to solve environmental problems.
I mean this is not about energy efficiency as much as pollution. If the energy comes from green sources and waste is a "carbon dioxide solid mineral?" then it would avoid microplastics and such going into the environment. If it was good in this way the best way to pay for it would be plastics being taxed in the amount to pay for post use processing with the rate depending on type and usage. Not sure if the waster material is useful. At best I could see building so given how littel the hydrogen brings it might be equivalently useful. I mean there are projects to such co2 out of the air and make it into a solid mineral although yeah it has the energy thing. I think this like those sorta need us to be 100% on non fossil fuel energy to really work although if they have dedicated solar/wind or such powering them it would make sense. Since thes can sorta work on demand that would make some sense.