Polyethylene hydrogenolysis to liquid products over bimetallic catalysts with favorable environmental footprint and economics.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 41213955.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-025-65260-7 and PMC identifier 12603241.
- Licence recorded as CC BY-NC-ND.
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Abstract
Assessing the sustainability of plastic chemical recycling requires realistic feedstocks and catalysts designed within sustainability-led frameworks (Plastic-to-X). We link catalyst design and systems analysis to study hydrogenolysis of high-density polyethylene (virgin and bottle caps; M<sub>w</sub> = 100-200 kDa). We report Ru-Ni alloy nanoparticles (3-4 nm) supported on titania that yield up to 55% liquid C<sub>6</sub>-C<sub>45</sub> products under optimized conditions, whereas monometallic Ru produces virtually no liquids Operando spectroscopy and simulations reveal structure sensitivity: backbone scission follows dehydrogenation and hydrogenation cycles at defective alloy sites formed in situ. Integrating these mechanistic insights with life cycle and techno-economic analyses indicates profitable processing of plastic caps over the optimal catalyst (2.5 wt% Ru, 5 wt% Ni) with substantially lower CO<sub>2</sub> emissions even when using green H<sub>2</sub>. Furthermore, within the Plastic-to-X framework, we identify a minimum average chain length threshold of C<sub>11</sub> for product distributions as a critical design metric to reconcile environmental and economic objectives.