A team led by U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory researchers is working to provide a baseline for plastic recycling studies with a new database of polymer data.
The 59-polymer database contains information about molecular composition, polymer morphology, molecular mass distributions, thermal properties, elemental compositions and the presence of additives in commercially available polymers that are often used in recycling studies.
The polymers the team selected for inclusion represent about 95% of polymers manufactured globally in 2018.
Amy Cuthbertson, currently a research chemist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Chemical Sciences Division, worked on the NREL database while doing postdoctoral work.
Cuthbertson said in the course of her deconstruction studies, which are used to develop new technology to break down plastics, she and others noticed that many of the standard research polymers contained additives they weren’t aware of.
“We decided to test all of the polymers in our library and found that there’s some discrepancies that were really important to know before conducting deconstruction research,” she said. “The point of this was to fully characterize accessible materials so the entire research community could access it.”
As more scientific – and legal – attention turns to plastic pollution, recycling and regulation on a global scale, this database and other, similar databases in development around the world will help develop new recycling technologies and better techniques for measuring chemical additives in plastics.
Cuthbertson is doing similar work at her new role at NIST, she said, as the scientific community is “still trying to wrap our head around the complexities of plastic formulation.”
