The paper's abstract is intriguing, and kind of buries the lead. The waste plastic angle is a bit of a headline-grabbing red herring. The authors claim they can turn straight-chain hydrocarbons into aromatic ring molecules, which I believe traditionally has been very hard. There's nothing special about waste plastic as a source of straight-chain hydrocarbons, they could be obtained from a variety of biomass sources.<p>Traditionally the only economical source of aromatic molecules has been distillation of petroleum. An economical way to turn biomass-derived simple hydrocarbons into aromatics could be revolutionary, as a path for making fuel as well as a range of other high-value compounds, like phenolic plastic resin.
Nice achievement, but I just don't see the environmental angle. The article implies that this might help solve the ocean plastic problem, but the plastic in the ocean isn't the plastic we carefully collected - it's the plastic that "got away". We won't be turning that into jet fuel any time soon.<p>And of course, taking the larger view, plastic is still made from fossil oil. Making it profitable to burn it is not going to help CO2 levels. The CO2 problem is larger than the ocean plastic problem, and even if we could turn ocean plastic into jet fuel - it's probably a bad trade.
As a few people have pointed out, this feels a lot like an attempt at solving one environmental problem (proliferation of waste plastic) by exacerbating another environmental problem (burning more fossil fuels). But if it took off, it could potentially serve as something of an intermediary step between our fossil fuel economy and a renewables-based economy. After all, the switch from horses to automobiles took 50 years. (<a href="https://thetyee.ca/News/2013/03/06/Horse-Dung-Big-Shift/" rel="nofollow">https://thetyee.ca/News/2013/03/06/Horse-Dung-Big-Shift/</a>, <a href="https://www.mnn.com/green-tech/transportation/blogs/horses-horsepower-rocky-transition" rel="nofollow">https://www.mnn.com/green-tech/transportation/blogs/horses-h...</a>) A similar shift to renewables could easily take as long or longer.
Adidas is producing millions of its shoes using ocean plastic: <a href="https://mymodernmet.com/adidas-parley-sustainable-fashion" rel="nofollow">https://mymodernmet.com/adidas-parley-sustainable-fashion</a> (and these shoes can be then turned into jet fuel).
Love this idea but as another user has pointed out, it's the plastic that 'gets away' that we should be concerned about. Similarly, microplastics in the ocean are - and will continue to be - a massive problem. A great concept, but sadly only one cog in a very confusing machine.
The article is vague. It says that the process recovers 100% of energy from plastics they tested. What plastics did they test? Also, there isn't a discussion on energy efficiency of the process.
How effective is it at converting plastic contaminated with food waste. The vast majority of plastic from my household is food packaging which is really quite expensive to decontaminate.