Discarded plastics, which can persist in the environment for hundreds of years, threaten waterways, ecosystems and even human health. Yet solving the global plastics crisis through increased recycling is proving to be a major challenge. Only about 9% of plastic waste is effectively recycled worldwide due to a set of complex obstacles. Contaminants can damage recycling equipment and degrade the quality of recovered materials. Sorting the different types of plastics is labour-intensive and technically demanding. And even when plastics are successfully recycled, repeated processing often reduces their strength, colour and flexibility, limiting the number of times they can be reused. "The long-chain molecules in polymers, which form plastics, are like strands of noodles," explains materials scientist, Jianjun Li. "Just as boiling noodles repeatedly causes them to become mushy and break apart, repeatedly heating polymers during recycling breaks down their molecular chains, resulting in lower quality materials."
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