How to turn plastics into soaps and detergents

Nov. 18 () –

After five years of research, a team of chemists from Virginia Tech have found a way to converting certain plastics into soaps, detergents, lubricants and other products.

Greg Liu, professor in the Department of Chemistry, and his team have published an article about the process and its feasibility and commercialization in the journal Nature Sustainability.

In simple terms, Liu’s system consists of two steps. First it involves using thermolysis, or the breakdown of a substance (in this case, plastic) through the use of heat. The plastic placed in a reactor built by Liu’s team and heated at between 340 and 400 degrees Celsius It decomposes into chemical compounds, leaving a mixture of oil, gas and residual solids.

The key to this first step was breaking down the polypropylene and polyethylene molecules that make up the plastic within a certain carbon range, and Liu and his team were able to achieve this.

The residual solids remaining were minimal and the gas could be captured and used as fuel. However, the product of greatest interest here was oil.

During his investigation, The team was able to functionalize, or change the chemistry, of oil into molecules that would become soaps, detergents, lubricants, and other products.

The process, which took less than a day, generated almost zero air pollution emissions, offering clues to a desperately needed solution to a relatively strong global problem, that of plastic pollution, according to the authors.

Liu and his team have found a way to break those links, but now potentially comes the hard part: expand the system and make it a continuous one, and, most importantly, make it profitable.

Liu said he is seeking help from the community to test a business model. This involves raising the capital needed to build a reactor that runs continuously in your lab, or perhaps creating a private startup company off-site to test speeding up your process. Yes, you can create soap from a few pieces of plastic, but Can tons of plastic soaps and detergents be generated profitably?

“There will be a lot of demand on our part to further reduce the risks of the process,” Liu said. “We have to reduce the risks so that [las empresas] can see the real value of it and can potentially adopt it,” he concluded.