Sunlight converts plastic waste to hydrogen fuel

[Judi Lynn]

BY ANNIKA FRIBERG5 SEPTEMBER 2018

Food contamination no problem for photocatalytic recycling process

UK scientists have discovered a simple sunlight-driven process to transform plastic waste into hydrogen and other useful chemicals.

‘We want to use non-recyclable waste and make something useful out of it. Plastic waste contains a lot of energy and when you throw it away, you throw away energy. Even when using biodegradable plastics, and waste is not generated, the energy in that plastic is still lost,’ says Moritz Kuehnel of Swansea University. Kuehnel together with Erwin Reisner, from the University of Cambridge, and colleagues have devised a method that uses cadmium sulfide quantum dots as photocatalysts to degrade plastics.

The process, called photoreforming, is simple. They drop the photocatalyst onto the plastic then immerse the plastic in an alkaline solution. Irradiation with sunlight reduces water from the solution to hydrogen while the plastic polymers simultaneously oxidise to small organic molecules. The group tested the system by photoreforming three common polymers; polylactic acid, polyethylene terphthalate and polyurethane. The results matched those of state-of-the-art hydrogen evolution photocatalysis systems that employed expensive sacrificial reagents.

More:
https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/sunlight-converts-plastic-waste-to-hydrogen-fuel/3009467.article

[eppur_se_muova]

1. Well, wonderful -- it's CADMIUM sulfide-based.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1578573/

[Judi Lynn]

2. Good grief. Definitely not time to celebrate. It's good to see the real information. Thanks. n/t