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.
Topic
Plastics
Polymers, packaging and the recycling routes that do — and don't — close the loop.
46 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.
TeardownOctober 3, 2026
Plastic pyrolysis: nameplate capacity is not operating performance
Closures and underutilisation expose the gap between making an oil and running a profitable plastic-to-plastic system.
TeardownOctober 2, 2026
Reju’s two-minute polyester claim leaves most of the process outside the stopwatch
Fast depolymerisation is not the same as fast textile recycling; sorting, purification and future plant operation determine the result.
ExplainerOctober 2, 2026
Toray’s recovered carbon fibre: strong filaments are not a new aircraft wing
Chemical resin removal can protect fibre quality, but short-fibre products and structural composites answer different engineering questions.
ExplainerSeptember 30, 2026
How molten salts turn plastic bags into fuel at 200°C
ORNL cracks polyethylene into gasoline-range fuel below 200°C using cheap aluminium-chloride salts. Clever chemistry — but lab-scale, polyethylene-only, and still a route to burning plastic.
TeardownSeptember 27, 2026
MacroCycle and Meta: a recycling deal made of credits, not plastic
Meta will buy environmental attribute credits from MacroCycle's solvent-based PET recycling. The chemistry is novel. The plant does not exist yet, and Meta is not buying any recycled material.
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 26, 2026
How sunlight turns plastic waste into hydrogen: inside Cambridge's 1 m² photoreforming panel
A semiconductor catches light, a cobalt–zirconium catalyst makes hydrogen, and dissolved plastic supplies the electrons. The first outdoor square-metre test works — modestly.
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.
TeardownSeptember 23, 2026
Bobine's 'electrified plastic recycling': striking numbers, no independent evidence
The French startup claims +45% yield, −60% energy and −45% cost by heating a catalyst with induction to turn plastic waste into olefins. Every figure is self-reported, and none has a baseline.
ExplainerSeptember 23, 2026
How fungi eat industrial waste: the four tools of mycoremediation
White-rot fungi evolved to digest wood. The same enzymes attack dyes, oil and some plastics, and their cell walls soak up heavy metals. A 2026 review maps what works — and where the evidence runs thin.
TeardownSeptember 22, 2026
The Recycling Partnership's 'Evolving Ton': excellent data, no prescription
Cartons up 61%, mixed paper down 34%, plastics now outweigh paper in U.S. recycling. The new report is the best picture of the bin we have — and says almost nothing about what to do.
ExplainerSeptember 21, 2026
Glue and elevators: how two sizes of bubble pull 90% of microplastics out of wastewater
RMIT researchers upgraded a 1960s treatment step — dissolved air flotation — by pairing microbubbles with nanobubbles. Lab results top 90% microplastic removal. Here is the mechanism and the caveats.
TeardownSeptember 20, 2026
BASF's ecovio Is Certified Home-Compostable. Two Data Sets Are Missing
A PBAT and PLA blend with TUV OK Compost Home certification. The disintegration is tested. The barrier performance and the microplastic question are not.
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.
TeardownSeptember 17, 2026
Envetec Says It Can Recycle Biohazardous Medical Waste. What Is Actually Proven?
On-site shredding and disinfection that turns regulated medical waste into recyclable polymer flake. The disinfection is certified. Most of the headline numbers are not.
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.
TeardownSeptember 12, 2026
Aduro's Hydrochemolytic Route: Water-Mediated Plastic Conversion, and the Refinery Problem It Does Not Escape
Aduro says its water-based chemistry converts waste plastic and heavy oil at lower temperatures than pyrolysis. Even if that holds, the output is still a feedstock that a refinery has to finish.
TeardownSeptember 12, 2026
Kirin and JSW Put PET Depolymerisation Inside a Twin-Screw Extruder
Chemical recycling of PET normally means a stirred tank and several hours. Kirin and JSW have moved the reaction into a continuous extruder. If the numbers hold, the interesting part is throughput per unit of capital.
Myth-BustingSeptember 11, 2026
"Compostable" Is a Facility Spec, Not a Property of the Object
Certified compostable packaging is engineered to break down in a hot industrial windrow. Put it in a garden bin, a recycling bin or a landfill and it behaves like ordinary plastic — because in those conditions, it is.
TeardownSeptember 11, 2026
ReBioCycle's PLA Loop: What a Closed Loop Means When Nobody Publishes the Yield
An EU project says it has closed the loop on PLA — sorting, depolymerising and repolymerising bioplastic back to virgin-grade. The chemistry is sound. The numbers that decide whether it matters are missing.
TeardownSeptember 10, 2026
The Ocean Cleanup Says 50 Million Kilograms. Here Is What That Is a Fraction Of.
The removal figure is real and independently plausible. Set against annual plastic inflow to the ocean, it represents a small fraction of a single year — and the river interceptors are the part of the programme that actually scales.
TeardownSeptember 9, 2026
Syntetica Wants to Recycle Nylon. The Feedstock Barely Exists in Recoverable Form.
Chemical depolymerisation of nylon 6 back to caprolactam is proven chemistry with decades of industrial history. The constraint has always been that most nylon in the world is blended into textiles that cannot be separated.
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 5, 2026
One Enzyme That Eats Bioplastic and Penicillin
A soil-derived enzyme called LCPH1 breaks down long-chain polyester bioplastics and cleaves the penicillin beta-lactam ring. It is much better at the second job than the first, which is the detail worth sitting with.
ExplainerSeptember 3, 2026
Magnetic Microrobots for Microplastics: What the Numbers Actually Show
A magnetically driven MXene microrobot removes most microplastic particles from water and rather less from soil. The recovery figures are real; the retrieval and leaching questions are the ones that decide whether it ever leaves the lab.
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 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 24, 2026
Can kimchi scraps become biodegradable plastic?
Engineered E. coli grown on radish-trimming hydrolysate accumulated poly(3-hydroxybutyrate) to 75.6% of dry cell weight. That is a real fermentation result. It is not yet a material, a plant, or a lower-impact life cycle.
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.
TeardownAugust 20, 2026
EPS transport packaging leaves the “problematic” list — but is it circular?
On 19 August the U.S. Plastics Pact removed expanded-polystyrene transport packaging from its Problematic and Unnecessary Materials list, citing a recycling rate above 30%. That is a real result on a narrow slice of foam — and it is not permission to put your foam cup in the recycling bin.
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.
Myth-BustingAugust 19, 2026
"If it is plastic, put it in the recycling bin"
Bags, wraps and mailers are plastic, carry resin codes, and look recyclable. They are also one of the most reliable ways to shut down a sorting line.
ExplainerAugust 19, 2026
The sunlight-and-catalyst filter that attacks wastewater pollutants
Photocatalysis usually arrives as a powder you then have to fish back out of the water. Fixing the catalyst to a resin bed turns it into something closer to a treatment step: water in one end, oxidised organics out the other.
TeardownAugust 16, 2026
MIT's recyclable stretch yarn: a design win, not yet a system
A polyethylene core-sheath yarn that stretches like PET-spandex and survives ten melt-and-respin cycles. The material result is real. The gap between a recyclable yarn and a recyclable garment is where almost all of the difficulty still sits.
Myth-BustingAugust 12, 2026
No, plastic cannot be recycled forever
Metals and glass survive remelting largely intact. Polymers do not. Every mechanical loop shortens chains, and the recycling symbol says nothing about how many loops a package will realistically get.
TeardownAugust 10, 2026
Nine companies, one shared recycling line: Japan's flexible-packaging trial
A Ministry of the Environment-commissioned demonstration puts nine Japanese companies on a shared platform to delaminate and deink flexible packaging. It is a genuinely interesting infrastructure model. It is not yet proof of scale.
TeardownAugust 8, 2026
A KitKat wrapper made from soft plastics: closed loop, or mass-balance proof of concept?
Nine and a half tonnes of pyrolysis oil, five tonnes of resin, seven million wrappers. A real supply chain ran end to end - and almost none of the numbers that would prove it works were published.
TeardownAugust 7, 2026
PureCycle's commercial rebound has real proof points - the economics are still on trial
Q2 brought first branded resin deliveries, seven customer conversions and 173% revenue growth. It also brought a $142m net loss. A look at what advanced recycling has actually demonstrated, and what remains a forecast.
Myth-BustingAugust 5, 2026
The triangle with a number does not mean "put me in the blue bin"
The chasing arrows around a 1, 2 or 5 identify the resin. They say nothing about whether your hauler collects it, whether the sorter can capture it, or whether anyone will buy it.
Myth-BustingAugust 1, 2026
Is Turning Plastic Into Hydrogen Actually Recycling?
The chemistry is real. The label is doing a lot of work. If the outputs are hydrogen gas and mineral carbonate, no plastic has been recycled — something else has happened.
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.