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61,005 resultsShowing papers similar to Plastic Waste to Value-Added Products via Recycling and Upcycling
ClearPlastic Waste Upcycling: A Sustainable Solution for Waste Management, Product Development, and Circular Economy
This review examined plastic waste upcycling as a sustainable alternative to conventional recycling, covering methods that transform plastic waste into value-added products and support circular economy goals while addressing environmental pollution.
Integration with biotechnological approaches for upcycling waste plastics
This review examines the limitations of mechanical, chemical, and thermal plastic recycling approaches — including restricted reprocessing cycles, high energy costs, and toxic emissions — and evaluates biotechnological strategies such as enzymatic and microbial degradation as complementary routes for waste plastic upcycling. The authors argue that integrating biological and chemical processes offers the most promising pathway for effective upcycling while reducing carbon emissions and advancing circular economy goals.
Upcycling of waste plastics: strategies, status-quo, and prospects
This review examines strategies for upcycling waste plastics into valuable products as an alternative to landfilling and incineration, which generate microplastics and carbon emissions respectively. Researchers survey chemical recycling methods including pyrolysis, gasification, and catalytic processes that can convert common plastics like PET, polyethylene, and polystyrene into fuels, chemicals, and new materials. The study highlights the urgent need for more effective recycling technologies to address the growing gap between plastic production and waste management capacity.
Cutting-edge developments in plastic biodegradation and upcycling via engineering approaches
This review examines how engineering approaches from synthetic biology and metabolic engineering can improve both the breakdown and upcycling of plastic waste. Researchers found that various microorganisms and their enzymes can degrade plastics and convert the resulting monomers into valuable products like biosurfactants, bioplastics, and biochemicals. The study suggests that optimizing microbial pathways and using hybrid chemo-biological approaches could help build a more sustainable circular plastic economy.
Sustainable Petrochemical Alternatives From Plastic Upcycling
This review examined pathways for upcycling plastic waste into sustainable petrochemical alternatives, addressing the poor end-of-life recovery prospects that allow carbon-rich plastics to degrade into microplastics in landfills and oceans. The paper assessed chemical and thermochemical conversion technologies that could turn plastic waste into feedstocks for the chemical industry.
Upcycling Plastic Waste into High Value‐Added Carbonaceous Materials
This review examines methods for converting plastic waste into high-value carbonaceous materials through upcycling techniques. Researchers surveyed approaches for transforming discarded plastics into products such as carbon fibres, water purification absorbents, and energy storage electrodes. The study suggests that upcycling plastic waste into carbon-based materials offers a practical alternative to conventional disposal methods like landfilling and incineration.
Biological Upcycling of Plastics Waste
This review summarizes research on using biological systems -- including enzymes, bacteria, and engineered microbes -- to break down plastic waste into useful chemicals and materials. Rather than traditional recycling that produces lower-quality plastic each time, biological approaches can convert waste plastics into valuable products like biodegradable plastics, fuels, and specialty chemicals, potentially reducing the flow of plastics into the environment where they break into harmful microplastics.
Business development from plastic wastes toward circular economy
This book chapter reviews how plastic waste can be converted into valuable materials or energy through various business models aligned with circular economy principles. Developing economically viable pathways for plastic waste recovery is essential for reducing the flow of plastics into the environment.
Advancements in catalysis for plastic resource utilization
This review examines catalytic strategies for converting plastic waste into value-added products and fuels, addressing how catalysis can improve the efficiency and selectivity of plastic valorization processes. The findings point to catalysis as essential for making plastic recycling and upcycling economically viable.
Approaches for Management and Valorization of Non-Homogeneous, Non-Recyclable Plastic Waste
This review examined management and valorization strategies for non-homogeneous, non-recyclable plastic waste, evaluating chemical recycling, energy recovery, and upcycling approaches as pathways to reduce environmental plastic accumulation and recover value from difficult-to-process waste streams.
Recent Advances in the Chemobiological Upcycling of Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) into Value-Added Chemicals
This review covers recent advances in biological and chemical upcycling of PET plastic waste into value-added chemicals, examining degradation pathways including pyrolysis, gasification, and enzymatic depolymerization that break PET into monomers for use as bioconversion substrates.
Progressing Plastics Circularity: A Review of Mechano-Biocatalytic Approaches for Waste Plastic (Re)valorization
This review examined mechano-biocatalytic approaches to plastic waste valorization — combining mechanical pre-treatment with enzyme catalysis — and argued that this pairing offers a scalable route to chemical recycling of mixed plastic streams that conventional methods struggle to process.
Plastics Recycling
This review examines the full landscape of plastic recycling, covering mechanical and chemical recycling processes for major resin types including PE, HDPE, LDPE, PET, polyurethanes, polystyrene, and polypropylene, alongside chemical upcycling of waste plastics into higher-value products. The chapter also addresses the environmental and economic benefits of recycling, plastic resin labelling systems, and the persistent challenges limiting recycling rates globally.
Toward Microbial Recycling and Upcycling of Plastics: Prospects and Challenges
This review examines the prospects and challenges of using microorganisms to recycle and upcycle plastic waste, assessing the current state of microbial degradation research across major polymer types. The authors identify metabolic engineering and synthetic biology as key tools needed to make biological plastic recycling economically viable at scale.
Plastic-to-values: technologies and applications
This study examines technologies and applications for converting plastic waste into valuable products, addressing plastic debris as an emerging pollutant affecting both land and marine systems globally and exploring pathways to mitigate plastic pollution through value-recovery approaches.
Management Strategies for Plastic Wastes: A Roadmap Toward Circular Economy and Environmental Sustainability
This chapter reviews strategies for managing plastic waste — including mechanical recycling, chemical recycling, and circular economy frameworks — as alternatives to landfilling and incineration. Unmanaged plastic waste breaks down into microplastics that spread widely through wind and water, making better upstream management critical for reducing environmental contamination. The authors argue that genuinely circular approaches, where waste is eliminated rather than merely shifted, offer the most effective path to reducing long-term microplastic pollution.
Recycling of Bioplastics: Routes and Benefits
Researchers reviewed how bioplastics — plastics made from biological sources rather than petroleum — combined with mechanical and chemical recycling could replace conventional plastics and help reduce microplastic buildup in marine ecosystems that ultimately accumulates in humans.
Polymer‐Based Recycling Strategies for Plastic Waste: A Comprehensive Review
This comprehensive review evaluates mechanical and chemical recycling strategies for plastic waste, noting that mechanical recycling is widely used but limited by polymer degradation, while chemical recycling offers higher quality recovery but at greater energy and financial cost. The study highlights emerging technologies including AI-assisted sorting, nanotechnology, and biodegradable polymer development as promising approaches for building a more circular plastics economy.
Plastic Recovery and Utilization: From Ocean Pollution to Green Economy
This review examines strategies for recovering and utilizing ocean plastic waste within a green economy framework, covering collection technologies, recycling pathways, and circular economy approaches to transform marine plastic pollution into valuable resources.
Perspectives on sustainable plastic treatment: A shift from linear to circular economy
This review examines emerging technologies for converting plastic waste into useful chemicals and fuels, including methods like pyrolysis, photocatalysis, and electrocatalysis. Researchers highlight how these approaches could shift plastic management from a throw-away model to a circular economy where waste becomes a resource. The study identifies remaining knowledge gaps and proposes future research directions for sustainable plastic treatment.
Mechanical recycling and upcycling of marine macro- and micro- plastics: technologies, challenges, and future directions
This review examines current technologies for mechanically recycling and upcycling plastic pollution collected from the ocean, covering everything from collection to processing into new materials. Researchers found that while significant progress has been made in sorting and reprocessing marine macroplastics, recycling marine microplastics remains a major technical challenge due to their small size and degraded condition. The study calls for continued innovation to make marine plastic recycling more cost-effective and scalable.
Polymers Recycling: Upcycling Techniques. an Overview
This paper is not about microplastics in a research sense; it is an overview of polymer recycling and upcycling techniques, mentioning microplastic accumulation briefly as motivation but not investigating microplastics directly.
Innovations and future trends in plastic waste management
This review examines innovations in marine plastic waste management including resource recovery, plastics-to-value conversion, co-processing, and dumpsite recovery approaches, presenting business case studies from developed and developing countries and discussing future trends such as biodegradable plastics and product designs optimised for recycling and upcycling.
Are Reliable and Emerging Technologies Available for Plastic Recycling in a Circular Economy?
This review examines the current landscape of plastic recycling technologies -- including mechanical, thermal, chemical, and biological depolymerization methods such as pyrolysis -- evaluating their readiness for circular economy integration. It concludes that while recycling rates remain below 10% globally, emerging technologies offer pathways toward closed-loop plastic supply chains, though full-scale implementation requires further development and performance assessment.