Summary
Polyethylene is a common and useful plastic. It is an inexpensive material that is manufactured, used, and discarded in vast quantities every year. This project aims to find a new way to recycle waste polyethylene by adding enough value for recycling to be economically viable at scale. The aim is to disassemble long polyethylene molecules into much smaller molecules that can be used as chemical building blocks. The challenge is to use a carefully timed sequence of chemical reactions to break some of the strong bonds in polyethylene molecules selectively. The speed at which each reaction procee
