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.

The plastic lifecycle currently emits more than 0.85 gigatons of greenhouse gases. If current plastic production and consumption patterns continue, emissions could reach 1.34 gigatons per year by 2050 ...

Sorting plastic is hard; scientists found compatibilizers may enable direct recycling of mixed plastics into 3D-printed ...

Water used to wash recycling materials in the study became progressively darker as it was reused. Photo courtesy of Greg Curtzwiler/Iowa State University. Researchers from Iowa State’s Polymer and ...

Dr. Byungwook Hwang's research team from the CCS Research Department at the Korea Institute of Energy Research (KIER) has successfully developed a process that applies the circulating fluidized bed ...

Plastic waste is one of the most serious pollution problems on the planet. Plastics are hard to break down and can last for decades in nature, even under the harshest conditions. A new catalyst ...

Plastics are widely used but difficult to degrade, posing an ecological challenge. A team from SIAT developed degradable "living plastics" using synthetic biology and polymer engineering. They ...

Researchers have developed a solar-powered reactor that transforms hard-to-recycle plastic waste into clean hydrogen ...

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 ...

Researchers at Osaka Metropolitan University have developed a new polymerization technique that chains chemical reactions in sequence, much like toppling dominoes, to produce sulfur-containing ...

Single-use plastic might just be the most insane act of collective self-harm humanity commits every single day. Each year, the United Nations Environment Programme estimates that we discard a ...