Every year we dispose of more than 300 millions tons of plastic. Amongst this plastic waste, around 100 million tons of multilayer plastics. Multilayer plastics, as the name suggests, are made up of many layers (up to 12) of varying polymers. This multilayer feature gives these plastics some specific properties like heat resistance or oxygen and moisture control, making them impossible to recycle using conventional methods.

But now, engineers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison have found a method for separating the polymers and then recycling them. They call their technique for doing this as STRAP (Solvent-Targeted Recovery and Precipitation). As some of you might have guessed, in this technique the multilayer plastic is put into specific solvent(s) to recover the polymers. The procedure involves thermodynamic calculations of polymer solubility to find the correct solvent(s) and then a series of washes are followed.

The results show polymers similar to the ones which were used to make the original plastic. This success leads to the usage of the obtained polymers to create new plastics and creates a recycling loop. As per research, this can allow the manufacturers to recover about 40% of the total plastic waste they produced which would be a great success for reducing so many plastic related issues.