Mandi: Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Mandi have developed a method that can transform plastic into hydrogen when exposed to light. The generation of hydrogen from plastics is particularly useful because the gas is considered the most practical non-polluting fuel of the future. Plastics, most of which are derived from petroleum, are not biodegradable, i.e., they cannot be easily broken down into harmless products. It is said most of the 4.9 billion tonnes of plastics ever produced would end up in landfills, threatening human health and the environment.
Fuelled by the need to prevent runaway plastic pollution, IIT-Mandi researchers are developing methods that can transform plastic into useful chemicals. This study was funded by the Scheme for Promotion of Academic and Research Collaboration (SPARC) of the Ministry of Education. The findings from this work have been recently published in the Journal of Environmental Chemical Engineering. The research was led by Prem Fexil Siril, Professor, School of Basic Sciences, IIT-Mandi, and Aditi Halder, Associate Professor, School of Basic Sciences, IIT-Mandi, and co-authored by their Ph.D. scholars, Rituporn Gogoi, Astha Singh, Vedasree Moutam, Lalita Sharma and Kajal Sharma.
"The ideal path to effective annihilation of plastics is to degrade them into useful chemicals. The generation of hydrogen from plastics is particularly useful because the gas is considered the most practical non-polluting fuel of the future," Siril said. The researchers have developed a catalyst that can efficiently convert plastics into hydrogen and other useful chemicals when exposed to light. Catalysts are substances that drive otherwise difficult or impossible reactions and when they are activated by light, they are called photocatalysts.
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