Sunlight hits tiny particles of plastic floating in a clear water solution. Slowly, they begin to disappear, leaving behind a familiar household chemical: acetic acid, the main ingredient in vinegar.

One reason plastic waste persists in the environment is because there’s not much that can eat it. The chemical structure of most polymers is stable and different enough from existing food sources that ...

Graduate student RJ Conk adjusts a reaction chamber in which mixed plastics are degraded into the reusable building blocks of new polymers. A new chemical process can essentially vaporize plastics ...

A team of chemists is pioneering a new approach to creating plastics made from whole-cell algae and common chemical components. These biohybrid plastics are strong, highly adaptable, and fully ...

Researchers at the University of Waterloo have discovered a way to turn plastic waste into acetic acid, the main ingredient ...

Getting microbes to eat plastic is a frequently touted solution to our growing waste problem, but making the approach practical is tricky. A new technique that impregnates plastic with the spores of ...

Nearly all black plastics get sent to the landfill or get incinerated because their pigment makes them difficult to sort in plastics recycling plants. As a result, the recycling industry pays little ...

Gamini Mendis, assistant professor of plastics engineering technology, in the plastics lab at Penn State University's Behrend campus. A company planning to build a huge plastics recycling facility in ...

The world is miserable at recycling plastics. Currently, just 10–15% of the plastic waste we generate annually is recycled — with the rest incinerated, buried in landfill or dumped as litter 1, 2. A ...

(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.) To bring this fact a bit closer to home, the U.S. produced an average of 0.75 pounds ...