ExplainerOctober 9, 2026
LaMa separates the gel problem from the plastic recycling stream
Superabsorbents complicate wet processing; reported 200 kg/hour operation does not establish a route for every used diaper or construction mat.
Writing
Explainers, teardowns, and myth-busting on waste management systems and green engineering.
30 postsReset filters
Explainer posts
ExplainerOctober 9, 2026
Hereon puts breaking points into a styrene-based plastic
Bio-based content and deliberate chain cleavage change material design; fragments are not yet proof of a closed recycling loop.
ExplainerOctober 8, 2026
Modified cellulose catches lead in solar-cell recycling solvents
Sulfur-bearing binding sites work beyond water, but removal efficiency is not yet a closed metal-and-solvent recycling loop.
ExplainerOctober 5, 2026
AMP Portsmouth: mixed-waste sorting and biochar are two different proof points
The expanded system links recovery with carbon removal, but operating sorting capacity is not operating biochar capacity.
ExplainerOctober 3, 2026
Cornell’s DEER process repairs electrodes before they become black mass
An electrochemical bath preserves electrode structure, but coin-cell recovery is not yet a pack-scale recycling service.
ExplainerSeptember 27, 2026
Indonesia's BRIN plan: waste to syngas, carbon nanotubes and captured CO2 — how each step works
BRIN is assembling AI sorting, gasification, plastic-to-nanotube conversion at 1,600 °C and calcium looping into one pipeline. Here is the chemistry of each stage and how much of it exists.
ExplainerSeptember 25, 2026
The EU wants 15% recycled plastic in new cars. Today it is 2.5%. Here is why the gap is so hard
The End-of-Life Vehicles Regulation mandates 15% recycled plastic from 2032 and 25% from 2036. To see why that is difficult, follow a car through the shredder.
ExplainerSeptember 22, 2026
Alberta bans solar panels from landfill: how panel recycling works, and who pays
From October 1, Alberta charges $14 on every new panel and bans end-of-life panels from landfill. Here is how a panel is taken apart, and why the fee is already contested.
ExplainerSeptember 19, 2026
800,000 Tons of Recyclable Film and Not Enough Buyers
The US generates roughly 800,000 tons of recoverable polyethylene film a year. Twenty-seven reclaimers can process it, and fewer than half will take household film.
ExplainerSeptember 19, 2026
California Recycles 37% of Its Carpet. That Number Took Fifteen Years
The first carpet EPR programme in the US now runs 174 drop-off sites and recycles 78.5 million pounds a year. It is also a lesson in how slowly EPR moves.
ExplainerSeptember 18, 2026
A Catalyst That Dissolves a Plastic Designed Never to Melt
pDCPD is a cross-linked thermoset with no recycling route. A ruthenium catalyst and a stirred solvent take it apart - and leave the carbon fibre intact.
ExplainerSeptember 17, 2026
Quebec Made Blue-Bin Glass Good Enough to Become a Bottle Again
For decades half of Quebec's curbside glass was buried as landfill cover. A $20M optical-sorting upgrade finally gets it clean enough for the furnace.
ExplainerSeptember 13, 2026
Terahertz Sorting: Seeing Through the Plastics That Near-Infrared Cannot
Near-infrared sorters are blind to black plastic and confused by multilayer film. Terahertz sensing sees through both. The physics is real; the belt speed and the detector price are not there yet.
ExplainerSeptember 13, 2026
Silex World and Magnet Recycling: The Chemistry Works, the Collection Does Not
Recovering neodymium and dysprosium from used magnets has been technically demonstrated many times over. Almost none of it happens, and the reason has nothing to do with metallurgy.
ExplainerSeptember 9, 2026
Carbonating Demolition Waste: How Old Concrete Absorbs CO2 Back
Crushed concrete reacts with CO2 to form calcium carbonate. Done deliberately, that upgrades recycled aggregate and stores a modest amount of carbon — and the modest part is where most reporting goes wrong.
ExplainerSeptember 6, 2026
Acrylic Is the One Plastic That Really Does Unzip
PMMA depolymerises back to its own monomer at high yield with nothing more exotic than heat. It is the clearest existing example of true chemical recycling — and the reason it stays rare is collection, not chemistry.
ExplainerSeptember 6, 2026
Microwaves and Deep Eutectic Solvents: A Gentler Route to Battery Lithium
Conventional battery recycling dissolves cathodes in hot mineral acid. Microwave-assisted leaching in a deep eutectic solvent does the same job at lower temperature, in minutes, with a solvent you can in principle reuse.
ExplainerSeptember 1, 2026
The recycling black sheep: sorting the film that optical sorters cannot see
Flexible film and black plastic defeat the two technologies a modern sorting plant relies on. A Finnish process uses density and water instead — and a 50,000-tonne plant is being built around it.
ExplainerAugust 31, 2026
Dirty PET goes in. An underwater glue and a stronger plastic come out.
Conventional PET recycling wants clean, clear, single-stream bottles. Oak Ridge built a catalyst-free route that takes the contaminated stuff and splits it into two high-value materials instead of low-grade flake.
ExplainerAugust 28, 2026
Scrap car aluminium has an iron problem. Oak Ridge designed an alloy that eats it.
Shredders mix steel rivets into aluminium body sheet, and iron makes recycled aluminium brittle. ORNL's answer was not to purify the scrap but to design an alloy that tolerates the contamination — found by screening two million calculations and verified with neutrons.
ExplainerAugust 25, 2026
The plastic that evaporates at 90 °C — and rebuilds itself
A Surrey team made a polyethylene-like polymer that turns to vapour at around 90 °C and condenses back into the same solid. The mechanism is elegant. The distance between it and a recycling system is the whole story.
ExplainerAugust 23, 2026
Can mixed plastic waste become the building blocks for new plastics?
Covestro is backing BioBTX to build a commercial plant in Delfzijl that turns hard-to-recycle plastic into benzene, toluene and xylene. The chemistry is straightforward. The evidence is a construction schedule.
ExplainerAugust 21, 2026
How biohazardous lab plastics can become recyclable material
Laboratory plastic is regulated waste before it is a material. A new on-site system shreds, disinfects and dewaters it where it is generated, so what leaves the building is polymer flake rather than a hazard consignment. The step from flake to product is the one still missing.
ExplainerAugust 20, 2026
Can aircraft waste become an aerogel?
Carbon-fibre epoxy composites are among the hardest materials to recycle, because the resin will not melt back. A team at NUS skips fibre recovery entirely and turns the whole waste stream — fibre and epoxy together — into a freeze-dried porous block.
ExplainerAugust 18, 2026
Can LFP batteries be recycled without dissolving them?
Iron-and-phosphate cathodes are cheap, which is exactly why conventional recycling struggles to pay for them. Direct regeneration takes a different route: repair the cathode powder instead of breaking it back down into salts.
ExplainerAugust 17, 2026
Can wastewater be a mine? The coagulant loop, explained
A UK startup just raised £700,000 to pull aluminium and iron treatment chemicals back out of water-plant sludge. It is a good excuse to explain a circular loop most people never see: the chemicals that clean water can themselves be recovered.
ExplainerAugust 15, 2026
The battery-fire tripwire inside an MRF
CP Group's Sentry pairs X-ray with RGB cameras and AI to spot batteries and propane cylinders on a moving recycling line. Circular Services is installing it now — here is how the detection zone works, and which numbers nobody has published yet.
ExplainerAugust 10, 2026
How an AI-assisted MRF actually sorts your recycling
Abu Dhabi is building a 400,000 tonne-a-year material recovery facility with optical sorting and AI. Here is what that machinery actually does to a conveyor belt of mixed waste - and what still falls off the end as residue.
ExplainerAugust 7, 2026
Dirty solvent in, reusable solvent out: the distillation loop behind on-site recycling
A US$25m financing deal for on-site solvent recycling is a good excuse to look at the mechanism itself: how heat, vapour and a condenser separate reusable solvent from everything else - and what the leftover still bottoms actually cost you.
ExplainerAugust 1, 2026
How Alkaline Thermal Treatment Pulls Hydrogen Out of Unsorted Plastic
A new PNAS study converts mixed PET, PE and PP into >90% pure hydrogen in one reactor — no polymer sorting, and most of the carbon never reaches the gas phase.