Complete breakdown of PMMA plastic into its building blocks

Surprisingly simple process

12-Mar-2025 - Polymer chemists at ETH Zurich have discovered a surprising way to virtually fully break down PMMA plastic – commonly known as acrylic glass – into its monomer building blocks. The process remains unaffected by the presence of additives. Today, plastics recycling is primarily limited to the ...

Green specialty chemicals from Verbio with Nobel Prize-winning innovation

Construction of the new ethenolysis plant in Bitterfeld progressing apace

27-Jan-2025 - The initial milestone in the construction of the world’s first large-scale ethenolysis plant based on rapeseed oil methyl ester has been reached: the first distillation column has been erected. Starting in 2026, large quantities of renewable molecules for the chemical industry will be produced at ...

Fermentation revolution?

Trash becomes treasure as bio-waste yields valuable acetone and isopropanol

07-Feb-2024 - In a major stride towards sustainable industrial fermentation, a team of researchers at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in The Netherlands, has unveiled pioneering advancements in the purification of isopropanol and acetone from the fermentation of waste gases. The study, published in ...

A carbon neutral solution for desalination?

Maybe so by tapping into geothermal

07-Nov-2018 - Water shortages are hitting some areas of the world hard, and with increasing global temperatures, more regions may be experiencing drought conditions. Countries such as Saudi Arabia rely on desalination plants to provide drinking water to their residents, producing 5 million cubic meters of ...

Boring down on boron

14-Jun-2018 - High-temperature desalination technologies can efficiently reduce the concentrations of a chemical element in seawater to make it an effective substitute for fresh water. Research that has investigated how the element boron evaporates could help produce higher-quality drinking and irrigation ...

Freshwater from salt water using only solar energy

21-Jun-2017 - A federally funded research effort to revolutionize water treatment has yielded an off-grid technology that uses energy from sunlight alone to turn salt water into fresh drinking water. The desalination system, which uses a combination of membrane distillation technology and light-harvesting ...

Squeezing every drop of fresh water from waste brine

31-May-2017 - Engineers at the University of California, Riverside have developed a new way to recover almost 100 percent of the water from highly concentrated salt solutions. The system will alleviate water shortages in arid regions and reduce concerns surrounding high salinity brine disposal, such as ...

Researchers list '7 chemical separations to change the world'

28-Apr-2016 - Thermally-based industrial chemical separation processes such as distillation now account for 10 to 15 percent of the world's annual energy use. Slaking the global thirst for energy could therefore get a substantial boost from improved technologies for producing fuels, plastics, food and other ...

New lasers for police and petrochemistry

22-Mar-2016 - Laser to replace breathalyser – this principle could be the future of traffic controls: Physicists of the University of Würzburg have developed a laser that can be used to measure alcohol in the driver's cab. But the new laser can do much more. Is this the future of traffic controls? A special ...

Beyond peer review: manage errors in research data

19-Sep-2013 - Traditional peer review is not enough to ensure data quality amid the recent boom in scientific research findings, according to results of a 10-year collaboration between the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and five technical journals. While production of research data is ...