Advanced Catalytic Technologies for Chemical Recycling of Waste Polyolefins
A Special Issue of Catalysts (ISSN 2073-4344) belonging to the section "Catalysis in Organic and Polymer Chemistry".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 May 2027 | Viewed by 13
Editors
Interests: polyolefins recycling; photothermal catalysis; halogenation; DMSO chemistry; sulfur chemistry
Interests: photocatalytic synthesis; radical chemistry; biomimetic catalysis; catalytic heterocycle synthesis; flow chemistry
Interests: asymmetric organic synthesis; natural products; bioactive compounds; iron as a catalyst; sustainable development; biomass utilization
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: homogeneous catalysts; sustainable reaction media; organic chemistry
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Polyolefins are the most mass-produced polymer materials worldwide, extensively applied in packaging, automotive, construction and daily consumer goods. Polyethylenes and polypropylenes themselves represent ca. 50 % (>225 Mt/year) of all plastics produced (>450 Mt/year). After their use, if not recovered and burnt, they get dispersed in the environment. Their inherent chemical inertness originates from their strong nonpolar C-C and C-H bonds, from their very weak Lewis basicity and Brønsted acidity, and from their low ionization energies and electron affinities. This leads to tremendous post-consumer plastic waste accumulation, triggering severe environmental pollution and massive loss of carbon resources. Conventional mechanical recycling suffers from product performance degradation. Simple thermal pyrolysis demands ultrahigh temperatures and delivers hydrogen and charcoal, next to uncontrollable mixtures of hydrocarbons. This limits large-scale industrial deployment. Catalytic degradation and recycling have emerged as a core sustainable strategy to break inert polyolefin skeletons under milder conditions, selectively converting waste polyolefins back to monomers, light olefins, liquid fuels, fine chemicals or regenerated polymers, which is critical to building a closed-loop plastic circular economy.
Various catalytic systems have been rapidly developed to address the bottlenecks of polyolefin recycling, including thermal heterogeneous catalysis, photocatalysis, electrocatalysis, tandem cascade catalysis, metal nanoparticle single-atom catalysts, zeolite acid catalysts, metal oxide composites and homogeneous organometallic catalysts. Key research focuses cover catalyst structural modulation, active site identification, C-C bond cleavage mechanisms, reaction pathway regulation, suppression of carbon deposition and catalyst deactivation, as well as process optimization for practical waste plastic feedstock.
This Special Issue aims to collect cutting-edge original research on catalytic degradation and resource recovery of waste polyolefins. We welcome contributions covering catalyst design, catalytic mechanism characterization, reaction engineering, techno-economic evaluation and scalable recycling technologies for polyolefin plastic recycling. Fundamental investigations on catalyst synthesis, in situ characterization and theoretical computation, as well as industrially feasible catalytic conversion routes, are highly encouraged to advance the development of low-carbon plastic recycling catalysis.
Dr. Heng Liu
Dr. Shiyu Guo
Prof. Dr. Pierre Vogel
Prof. Dr. Raul SanMartin
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- waste polyolefins
- catalytic degradation
- plastic chemical recycling
- catalytic upcycling
- C–C bond cleavage
- hydrogenolysis
- photocatalysis
- tandem catalysis
- circular plastic economy
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