New process turns mixed plastic waste directly into hydrogen fuel without sorting (phys.org)

submitted 5 days ago by Hypx@piefed.social to c/hydrogen@piefed.social

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Plastic has become a ubiquitous part of modern life—in water bottles, shopping bags and car dashboards. But once discarded, it is among the hardest materials on Earth to recycle. Most recycling processes require plastics to be sorted by type first, a step that is both labor-intensive and costly. As a result, only 9% of discarded plastic is actually recycled, while 79% is dumped in landfills and another 12% is incinerated, releasing carbon dioxide in the process.

Now, a team co-led by researchers at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and Ewha Womans University in South Korea has demonstrated a new chemical approach that converts a mixture of the three most common plastics directly into high-purity hydrogen fuel at temperatures far below conventional gasification. The process locks carbon dioxide away as a solid mineral without releasing the greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.

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[-] bombadil@feddit.org 3 points 5 days ago

Not a chemist nor supply chain expert so salt to taste:

Looks like they tried ratios between 1:1 to 4:1 sodium hydroxide to plastic. Wikipedia says in 2022, worldwide production for sodium hydroxide was roughly 83 million tons/year. Plastic waste from a cursory google seems like 350-400 million tons/year.

They do say in the paper that one product of the reaction can be converted back into sodium hydroxide using calcium hydroxide, but I assume you'd then need a fair bit of that.

If you can believe something the Calcium Carbonate Association Europe writes there is a fair bit of wiggle room before we start using more calcium carbonate than is regenerated, but you have burn that to get calcium oxide (to then turn into calcium hydroxide using water), which is very CO2 intensive. According to Wikipedia with a 2007 source, worldwide production of calcium oxide is around 283 million tons/year.

Oh also their experiments were using 0.05g of plastic for each run. Not sure why and whether scaling that would be a problem.

So yeah, like the last paragraph says:

The researchers say further work is needed to optimize the process and evaluate its economic viability before it can be deployed at scale.

this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2026

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