Question: how do you make plastics out of recycle material

Helena Quilter answered on 8 Mar 2016:

Hey there! You can make new plastics out of recycled material by breaking them down into chemicals and attaching them together again in a different way. We can do things like take old plastic bottles, use machines to chew them up and then do some chemistry to make completely new things. You might have seen you can get things like pens and rulers that say “I used to be a plastic bottle” and things like that! It takes quite a lot of energy to do this though!

What I’m trying to do at my work is make completely new plastics from chemicals that would otherwise be wasted – like an oil you can find in waste orange peels called limonene. I’m trying to make that into plastics that I hope will be biodegradable so they will break down naturally in the environment and cause less pollution than plastics that we have at the minute.

It’s quite tricky to do though! I’m taking my limonene chemical and adding oxygen to it. Then I’m trying to react it with a gas called carbon dioxide, or CO2 (which causes global warming so it’s good to try and use it up to get rid of some of it!). Hopefully in the end I’ll get big long chain molecules made up of lots and lots of repeating bits – a bit like a string of pearls. That will be my plastic! I haven’t managed to make enough yet to make a bottle out of though 🙁 I’ll keep trying!