Making useful plastics cheaply from waste

 

A team at the University of Delaware is looking at turning some waste left over from the pulp paper industry called technical lignin and turning this into something useful. Technical lignin is a widely available resource about 100 million tons of technical lignin waste is generated annually and currently is only used to be burnt for heat or sometimes added to tyres as a filler. The team has demonstrated that it’s possible to turn this lignin into bio-based 3-D printing resins and high-performance plastics. Changing lignin into a useful product used to require high pressures and the use of solvents which made the cost of doing anything with this lignin prohibitive. Research team found that they could replace methanol which was the traditional solvent in lignin deconstruction with cheap glycerine so the process could be done at normal atmospheric pressure. The glycerine breaks down the lignin into useful chemical building blocks that we can be used in many other types of processes.


Photo courtesy of Paul Pranda

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