A radical new process “vaporizes” plastic bags and bottles to help make recycled materials. American scientists say the innovative chemical procedure turns ubiquitous waste items into hydrocarbon ...

Harnessing moisture from air, Northwestern University chemists have developed a simple new method for breaking down plastic waste. The non-toxic, environmentally friendly, solvent-free process first ...

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and University of California, Santa Barbara researchers teamed with Dow to develop a breakthrough process to transform the most widely produced plastic — ...

We know that most plastics thrown into the recycling bin don’t get recycled, but what about the ones that do? According to new research, those also end up spitting bits of plastic back into the ...

Polyethylene plastics — in particular, the ubiquitous plastic bag that blights the landscape — are notoriously hard to recycle. They’re sturdy and difficult to break down, and if they’re recycled at ...

One single-use plastic bag takes at least 450 years to degrade. Give Miranda Wang three hours and she can reduce ten of them into liquid. Wang is the first to discover a chemical process that tackles ...

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 ...