Turning plastic waste into soap can be a way to reuse them

Researchers have invented a new method to reuse disposable plastics. According to them, plastic can be used to produce soap.

According to Tekna technology and technology news service, a group of researchers from the Virginia Institute used a new approach to produce soap from plastic.

In this method, plastic material is converted into a kind of chemical substance called surfactant. This substance is widely used in making soap. Plastics are very similar to the fatty acids in soap. Based on this, the hypothesis of turning polyethylene into soap was proposed. Of course, there are many problems in this way. For example, plastic molecules have about 3000 carbon atoms and are very large at the molecular level. While fatty acids are very small in size.

To solve this problem, a type of reactor was built in which plastics were burned. As a result of the heat, the polymer chains were opened at the bottom, and due to the low temperature in the upper part, excessive breaking did not happen. In this process, short-chain polyethylene was produced, which has a shape similar to wax. After adding several stages of soap making, the researchers finally succeeded in making the world’s first soap from plastic. Two forms of plastic can be used in this process. These two types include half of the plastic waste that is produced in the amount of 200 million tons in a year. Currently, most of the plastic waste is thrown away and a very small part of it is recycled.