Scientists at University of Cambridge in England have found a way of recycling plastic with battery acid. What makes their discovery extra special, is both materials still end up as waste in many societies. While in the Cambridge laboratory they have a fresh purpose, producing clean hydrogen fuel.
Recycling Plastic With Solar-Power
The Cambridge team are going green by powering the process with a ’solar reactor’. They believe this innovation could ‘create a circular system where one waste stream solves another’.
Solar-powered acid ‘photoreforming’, as they call their method, has potential to challenge the current situation. This is important, because only 18% of global plastic is recycled, with the rest going for burning, landfill, or dumping on land or sea.
This project is of particular interest to us at UPS Battery Center, because it repurposes sulfuric acid from car starter batteries. This highly-corrosive liquid is currently mostly neutralized, and then discarded carelessly, according to the researchers.
Key to Using Battery Acid for Recycling
Recycling plastic with battery acid only became feasible after the Cambridge team engineered a photocatalyst, that was able to withstand the corrosive effect.
“The discovery was almost accidental,” the lead researcher admits. “We used to think acid was completely off limits in these solar-powered systems, because it would simply dissolve everything. But our catalyst did nor dissolve. And so suddenly a whole new world of reactions opened up.”
The photocatalyst was thus the key to recycling plastics at a sustainable cost. This how it worked in practice:
- The team first treated the waste plastic with the waste lead battery acid.
- This broke down the long polymer chains into chemical building blocks.
- The photocatalyst then converted the ethylene glycol to hydrogen and acetic acid.
- Acetic acid is the main ingredient of vinegar, and has a future use too.
“Recycling plastic with battery acid is an untapped resource,” another team member enthuses. “If we can collect the acid before it’s neutralised, then we can use it again and again to break down plastics.
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