Using organic catalysts, scientists at I.B.M.’s Almaden Research Center (San Jose, California / USA; www.almaden.ibm.com) have developed a new process by which plastics can be recycled continuously. The project, carried out in cooperation with researchers from Stanford University (www.stanford.edu), replaces metal oxide or metal hydroxide catalysts with organic ones, which allow the polymerization process to be reversed. The result is a new type of biodegradable plastics, whose properties resemble those of existing materials, and which could potentially mean a significant reduction in waste and pollution.

The innovation is particularly interesting for the pharmaceutical industry, Chandrasekhar Narayan, who heads Almaden’s science and technology team, told The New York Times. “The pharma industry has a lot of good drugs on the shelf that they can’t use because they are very toxic. You could encapsulate drugs in a bioplastic polymer and deliver them directly to the cancer site. The polymer degrades locally at the site and releases the cargo,” he told the NYT. Narayan said production of these organic catalysts was very cheap and that I.B.M. was already in negotiations with several pharmaceutical companies to develop a pilot project for their application.

But organocatalysis also has consequences for conventional recycling practices. Replacing materials that are difficult to recycle, such as PET, organic catalysts could make a huge impact in the recycling of plastic bottles for instance. With that in mind, researchers from Stanford and I.B.M. have begun cooperating with the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (Riyadh / Saudi Arabia; www.kacst.edu.sa).

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