Deconstruction

In many instances, mechanical recycling fails even with better sorting and controlled reprocessing. The complexity of products that are either created from multiple polymers, imbued with fillers ranging from talc to carbon fibres, or built into multi-component objects like credit cards or conveyor belts may make mechanical recycling impossible. Not only can these multi-materials contaminate traditional recycling streams, but value can also be lost by neglecting the recovery of other components.

Chemical recycling, in particular selective depolymerisation, is an emergent strategy to broaden the circularity of synthetic polymers, through deconstructing complex materials back into their chemical building blocks. Innovative solutions within this space can address both the diversity of polymer wastes and the challenge of contamination resulting from their production, use and reuse.

Deconstruction is unique, as it offers the potential to capture all resources from these complex objects. Within this space, we have shown that we can recover the precious metals and barium magnetic strip from Mastercards through depolymerisation, we have created degradable thermosetting resins that enable recovery of pristine carbon fibres from polymer composites, and are developing new recyclable catalysts for polyester, polyamide and polyurethane deconstruction.

We view deconstruction as a complementary technology to traditional recycling systems, especially when this can be done in tandem and with mixed waste streams.