Resonant Acoustic Mixing (RAM) offers a simple, efficient route for mechanochemical synthesis in the absence of milling media or bulk solvents. Here, we show the use of RAM to conduct...
Waste polyester textiles trap copious amounts of useful polymers, which are not recycled due to separation challenges and partial structural degradation during use and thermo-mechanical recycling. Chemical recycling of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) through depolymerization can provide a feedstock of recycled monomers to make "as-new" polymers, and reduce the accumulation of plastic waste in landfills. Enzymes are highly specific, renewable, environmentally benign catalysts, with hydrolases available that are active on common PET textile fibers and on cotton. The enzymatic PET recycling methods in development, however, have thus far been limited to clean, high-quality PET feedstocks, and most such processes require an energy-intensive melt-amorphization step ahead of enzymatic depolymerization. Here we report that high-crystallinity PET in mixed PET/cotton textiles can be directly and selectively depolymerized to terephthalic acid (TPA) by using a commercial cutinase from Humicola insolens under moist-solid reaction conditions, affording up to 30 ± 2% yield of TPA. The process is readily combined with cotton depolymerisation through simultaneous application of cellulase enzymes (CTec2®), providing up to 83 ± 4% yield of glucose without any negative influence on the TPA yield. The herein presented selective and/or simultaneous enzymatic hydrolysis of PET/cotton textiles in solid reaction mixtures can expand the biocatalytic recycling processes of PET to less-valuable waste materials, and significantly increase its profitability through operating at very high solid-loading (40%), without the need for melt-amorphization.
In efforts toward designing self-assembled materials that can later be disassembled easily to avoid destruction of component materials during separation and recycling to minimize waste at their end of life,...
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.