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Ceria-Based Catalysts for Sustainable Processing of Plastic Waste
Original title: Ceria‐Based Catalysts for Sustainable Processing of Plastic Waste
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This review pulls together recent research on using a special material called cerium oxide (CeO2) to break down plastic waste more efficiently, turning it into reusable chemicals instead of letting it pile up in landfills or oceans. Better plastic recycling technology like this matters because it could reduce the amount of plastic waste that breaks down into microplastics, which are increasingly found in our food, water, and even our bodies. This is a summary of existing scientific findings rather than new experimental results, so real-world applications are still being developed.
New chemical recycling processes for mitigating plastic pollution are being developed every day. Plastic depolymerization is typically conducted under high temperatures and pressures in pyrolysis, hydrogenolysis, ammonolysis, and glycolysis processes, which require robust heterogeneous catalysts that tolerate such extreme conditions. Furthermore, bifunctional metal/metal oxide catalysts offer synergistic effects emanating from metal–support interactions and hydrogen spillover. CeO 2 is emerging as an effective material as depolymerization catalysts due to its Lewis acid–base properties and high reducibility for generating oxygen vacancies. This review summarizes the recent efforts of using CeO 2 ‐based catalysts for plastic waste depolymerization. The intrinsic properties of CeO 2 that reinforce its uniqueness as a catalytic material for substrate activation are examined, followed by an examination of how these properties manifest in metal–support catalysis, where CeO 2 acts synergistically with the active metal, and its morphology plays an important role in determining product selectivity. In addition, cases in which CeO 2 serves as the primary active species for plastic waste depolymerization are discussed, particularly in the thermal and photothermal glycolysis of heteroatom‐containing plastics. Finally, perspectives are provided on gaining a greater mechanistic understanding of CeO 2 ‐based depolymerization processes and on facilitating their translation to industrial applications.
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