Blasting Plastic Waste with Low-Powered Lasers Creates Carbon Dots, Delivers Novel Recycling
Changing molecular bonds with laser light could turn plastic waste into a valuable material for future technologies, researchers claim.
Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin, the University of California at Berkeley, Tohoku University, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Baylor University, and the Pennsylvania State University believe they may have a better way to recycle plastics — by blasting them with lasers to break them down into carbon dots.
"By harnessing these unique reactions, we can explore new pathways for transforming environmental pollutants into valuable, reusable chemicals, contributing to the development of a more sustainable and circular economy," claims project co-lead Yuebing Zheng of the team's laser-based research. "This discovery has significant implications for addressing environmental challenges and advancing the field of green chemistry."
Designed to offer a potential solution to the growing problem of plastic waste, which is often hard to recycle and harder still to dispose of safetly, the team's work sees plastic hit with relatively low-powered laser light in order to reassemble its chemical bonds — turning it into luminescent carbon dots, a material that is of-interest in a range of fields including as the basis for a potential memory for future computers.
"It's exciting to potentially take plastic that on its own may never break down and turn it into something useful for many different industries," says first author Jingan Li of the team's work — the the researchers admit that there's a long road to commercialization of the technology, which they are now working to optimize and test at an industrial scale.
The team's work has been published in the journal Nature Communications under open-access terms.
Main article image courtesy of the University of Texas at Austin.