A team co-led by researchers at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and Ewha Womans University in South Korea has demonstrated a new chemical approach that converts a mixture of the three most common plastics directly into high-purity hydrogen fuel at temperatures far below conventional gasification. The process locks carbon dioxide away as a solid mineral without releasing the greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.
Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study shows that alkaline thermal treatment (ATT)—a process in which sodium hydroxide reacts with organic material under heat to drive hydrogen production—can efficiently handle mixed polyethylene terephthalate (PET), polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP) waste in a single reactor, yielding hydrogen gas with purities exceeding 90% without requiring any sorting of plastic types.
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