Today’s chemical and plastic industry needs to evolve to a sustainable and circular carbochemical industry. This requires developing technologies for extensive recycling and, preferably, deploy them in cascade, and complementing them with technologies for valorizing renewable carbon such as CO2 and biomass (Towards circular carbo-chemicals, 2021; Managing Plastic Waste, 2021 and Plastic recycling stripped naked, 2024).
We are developing several of these technologies. Beyond polyolefin pyrolysis, we are exploring the possibility of recycling polymer wastes to build a circular carbochemical industry. More specifically, we are revisiting the alcoholysis of the polyurethane foams used in matrasses, in such a way as to recover all the monomers, i.e., the polyol as well as the diisocyanate. The approach consist of converting all the diisocyanate-based components to dicarbamate to be subsequently recycled to diisocyanate by pyrolysis. Shahab Zamani and Ege Hosgor conclude that carbamate and urea components can’t be properly recycled to isocyanate at mild conditions in the presence of catalysts, hence the need for more severe pyrolysis conditions. Meanwhile, Ege Hosgor from Molecular nanoFabrication (MnF) is developing a novel approach for the selective depolymerization of polyurethane foam to polyols and dicarbamate using decarbonate as reagent.
