SMITHSONIAN • April 26, 2021
New research may offer a way to keep single-use plastics such as grocery bags, bottles, straws and food containers out of landfills. But instead of transforming these hard-to-recycle products back into useful plastics, the new technique reduces the plastics back down to the petroleum oil used to make them in the first place, reports Molly Taft for Gizmodo. The resulting oil can then find a new life as fuels or lubricants. Apart from keeping single-use plastics out of landfills, if implemented at a large scale the new method could reduce the world’s oil demands.