Polyethylene is a very important and widely used plastic and is difficult to break down in nature. A new project will enable the recycling and upgrading of polyethylene by converting it into biodegradable polyester in three stages.
An international team of researchers led by Aarhus University in Denmark has now been awarded a €4.8 million grant from Horizon Europe, the European Union's framework program for research and innovation, to develop an industrially viable method of converting polyethylene into biodegradable polyester and other high-value products. The project is called ACTPAC, an acronym for “An Integrated Conversion Pathway from Carbon-Carbon Main Chain Plastic Wastes to High-Value Chemicals and Materials”.
“It is often difficult to degrade polyethylene because of the strong carbon bonds that make up the molecular backbone of this plastic. However, in collaboration with a wide range of other researchers, we have determined that this can be done through enzymatic, microbial and chemical processes. In the ACTPAC project, we will demonstrate a fully industrially viable method for converting polyethylene first to alkanes, then to high-value chemicals (monomers), and ultimately to polyethylene-like but fully biodegradable polyesters.” said Prof. Zheng Guo of Aarhus University's Department of Biological and Chemical Engineering, who is leading the project.
A full 80 percent of all plastics produced today contain these strong carbon bonds, which is why incineration and landfills are the most common methods of plastics disposal. However, plastic production has only increased in recent decades, making plastic waste a huge problem-especially when only such a small portion is converted into high-value products.
In the ACTPAC project, 11 partners from eight different countries will develop a system consisting of a three-part technology, namely.
(1) conversion of polyethylene to alkanes, (2) conversion to high-value chemicals (monomers) through a biologically based process, and (3) conversion to fully biodegradable polymers through an enzyme-catalyzed process.
The ACTPAC project will then scale up the entire system for a pilot demonstration.
“This project is an important milestone in the bio-based and catalyzed degradation of plastics and a big step towards a zero-waste solution to the huge pollution problem of today, i.e. managing plastic waste.” Guo admits, “Today, there is a great need to develop new methods to innovatively recycle plastic waste. With ACTPAC, we are establishing the most profitable upgrades to PE's non-polluting solutions, and we are moving towards a paradigm shift in the plastics economy.”
The Horizon Europe-funded project was launched in January 2024. The project is led by Prof. Zheng Guo from Aarhus University in Denmark, but it involves researchers from a wide range of disciplines. In addition to Aarhus University, there are 11 other partners in the project: the University of Utrecht (Netherlands), the University of Münster (Germany), the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) (France), the University of Groningen (Netherlands), AIMPLAS - Association for the Study of Plastics and Composites (Spain), Krechnologies (Biolynx) (Belgium), Innovaplast (Turkey), Minds & Sparks GmbH, Austria, B4PLASTICS, Belgium and CTCR, Spain.
