Catalysts and Catalytic Processes

Dear Colleagues,

Millions of tonnes of plastic are produced per year globally with approximately 50% of this plastic produced for single-use applications such as packaging and disposable consumer items, which means that much of this plastic quickly becomes waste. About 86% of the waste plastic in the United States is sent to landfills. However, with decreasing space and consequentially increasing costs of landfill usage, alternatives to landfills are currently being researched and developed.

Sending plastics to landfills can be especially detrimental for the environment as it takes many plastics hundreds, if not thousands, of years to degrade. Even biodegradable plastics may take considerable amounts of time to degrade as the rate of degradation depends on many physical factors such as ultraviolet light exposure, oxygen, and temperature.

This Special Issue will focus on waste plastic up-cycling, which is chemical recycling where the polymer is depolymerized and then repolymerized with the option to produce high value monomers, chemicals, fuel and liquid hydrocarbons. Waste plastic up-cycling has the main advantage of processing heterogeneous and contaminated polymeric waste without sorting and requires little or no pre-treatment.

We invite authors to submit manuscripts that will address the topics of waste plastic up-cycling; related catalysis, process & plant design, techno economic assessment, life cycle analysis, reduction to practice; the production of monomers, chemical intermediates/products, and refinery-like liquids; and the circular monomer–plastic economy.

Dr. Anne M. Gaffney
Dr. Gennaro J. Maffia
Guest Editors

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