Before you read this, look around your room. How much of your surroundings are made of plastic? The chair that you sit on, the desk, the casing on your computer and monitor, the pen you use, the carpet, the shoes you wear, your clothes, your bag, the soda bottle you sip from, the furniture, the walls and even the plumbing—how many items can you identify that are plastic?
Depending on where you reside, the majority of the things around you might be made of different types of plastic. Now, if you’re outside, various parts of your car, the buses and trains, even the interior of airplanes are mostly plastic. Currently there are not many methods to recycle plastics efficiently without compromising quality. So, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that not a day goes by without news of microplastics in our oceans and possibly in our food supply.
Much of the goods that fill our homes today is made of vinyl, a type of plastic. Recently there was a breakthrough at the Kohsaka Lab that is a solid step forward towards recyclable vinyl.
Following in the footsteps of the father of vinyl, Waldo Semon, who formulated the plasticized PVC while experimenting with synthetic adhesives, 2nd year graduate student Akane Kazama, and her professor, Dr. Yasuhiro Kohsaka of Shinshu University’s Textile Science and Technology Department were not exactly searching for recyclable vinyl when they made this discovery.
The lab was conducting an acid hydrolysis of a polymer, expecting it to breakdown into a polyketone with 1,3-dicarbonyl skeletons, but instead the reaction produced salicylic acid and acetic acid, or pre-cursors to dehydroaspirin. This was a fortunate surprise because it is very difficult to degrade vinyl back into its ingredients. Previous recyclable vinyl had been too unstable to work with at room temperature, and was not suitable for practical use.
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