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PLASTIC RECYCLING

Graphene from plastic waste makes cars greener

Nature Reviews Materials volume 7, page 425 (2022)Cite this article

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When a car reaches the end of its life, the valuable metals and electronic components are largely recovered, but the plastics, which can weigh as much as 350 kg, typically go to landfill. Now, writing in Communications Engineering, James Tour and colleagues report the upcycling of waste plastics from vehicles into graphene that is then used as an additive in foams for cars, creating an environmentally friendly, circular process.

The process was demonstrated using a mix of bumpers, gaskets, carpets, mats, and seating and door casings, with a bit of added metcoke to facilitate the reaction. The obtained flash graphene was of very high quality. One of the interesting properties of flash graphene is that it has better dispersibility than commercial graphene, so that sonication can be used to obtain stable dispersions of flash graphene in several solvents.

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  • Luong, D. X. et al. Gram-scale bottom-up flash graphene synthesis. Nature 577, 647–651 (2020)

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  1. Nature Reviews Materials http://www.nature.com/natrevmats/

    Giulia Pacchioni

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  1. Giulia Pacchioni
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Correspondence to Giulia Pacchioni.

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Pacchioni, G. Graphene from plastic waste makes cars greener. Nat Rev Mater 7, 425 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41578-022-00452-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41578-022-00452-x

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