Professor Woo-Jae Kim and his research team in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science have developed the world’s first catalytic process to directly produce clean hydrogen from unsorted mixed plastic waste without carbon dioxide emissions. The study presents a new approach that can simultaneously convert plastic waste into a resource and produce clean hydrogen.
Conventional plastic waste recycling requires the separation and sorting of different types of plastics, creating limitations for practical application to mixed waste streams. To overcome this challenge, Professor Kim’s team developed a new process that can treat mixtures of plastics, including PET, PE, and PP, without separate sorting. Using alkaline thermal treatment (ATT), the process produces hydrogen from plastic waste while storing the carbon contained in the plastics in solid form, thereby reducing carbon emissions.
The researchers confirmed hydrogen production through experiments using actual mixed plastic waste and estimated the potential to produce approximately 790,000 tons of clean hydrogen annually based on domestic plastic waste generation. The achievement is significant in that it integrates plastic waste treatment and clean hydrogen production into a single process.
The technology is expected to have potential applications in various fields, including power generation and mobility fuels, green reducing agents, sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) production, and low-carbon chemical industries.
Professor Woo-Jae Kim said, “The significance of this research lies in redefining plastic waste, long regarded as a symbol of environmental pollution, as another potential resource for clean hydrogen.” He added that reducing sorting costs and process complexity could help open new possibilities in both hydrogen production and environmentally sustainable waste treatment.
The research was supported by the Engineering Research Center (ERC) Program of the National Research Foundation of Korea, the National Research Laboratory (NRL 2.0) Program of the Ministry of Science and ICT and the Ministry of Education, and the Institute for Multiscale Matter and Systems (IMMS). The findings were published in the international journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) under the title “Selective and Direct Hydrogen Generation from Mixed Plastic Waste via Alkaline Thermal Treatment with Inherent Carbon Storage.”
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