Journal
ACS SUSTAINABLE CHEMISTRY & ENGINEERING
Volume 9, Issue 2, Pages 623-628Publisher
AMER CHEMICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1021/acssuschemeng.0c07612
Keywords
Olefin-intermediate process; Polyethylene; Plastics upcycling; Olefin cross metathesis; Dehydrogenation
Categories
Funding
- U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) [DE-AC36-08GO28308]
- Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) Program at NREL
- US Department of Energy, Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Advanced Manufacturing Office (AMO)
- Bioenergy Technologies Office (BETO)
- AMO
- BETO [DE-AC36-08GO28308]
- National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL)
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Recent research has developed a new chemical recycling technology that utilizes a heterogeneous catalyst system to depolymerize polyethylene feedstocks into a mixture of alkane products, offering a selective and versatile means to break down polyolefins at lower severity conditions.
The accumulation of plastic waste in the environment has prompted the development of new chemical recycling technologies. A recently reported approach employed homogeneous organometallic catalysts for tandem dehydrogenation and olefin cross metathesis to depolymerize polyethylene (PE) feedstocks to a mixture of alkane products. Here, we build on that prior work by developing a fully heterogeneous catalyst system using a physical mixture of SnPt/gamma-Al2O3 and Re2O7/gamma-Al2O3. This heterogeneous catalyst system produces a distribution of linear alkane products from a model, linear C-20 alkane, n-eicosane, and from a linear PE substrate (which is representative of high-density polyethylene), both in an n-pentane solvent. For the PE substrate, a molecular weight decrease of 73% was observed at 200 degrees C in 15 h. This type of tandem chemistry is an example of an olefin-intermediate process, in which poorly reactive aliphatic substrates are first activated through dehydrogenation and then functionalized or cleaved by a highly-active olefin catalyst. Olefin-intermediate processes like that examined here offer both a selective and versatile means to depolymerize polyolefins at lower severity than traditional pyrolysis or cracking conditions.
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