One‐pot Upcycling of Waste Plastics for Selective Hydrogen Production at Low‐Temperature

Abstract

AbstractTowards global efforts for efficient and sustainable ways to utilize polyethylene terephthalate (PET)‐based plastic waste, herein we report an integrated process for the complete one‐pot transformation of PET‐based plastic waste for hydrogen gas production in an alkaline aqueous condition over a heterogeneous ruthenium catalyst at low temperature (110‐160 °C). We could achieve complete selectivity with a high yield of H2 gas (∼38,000 mL H2/gPET/gRu) without any traces of CO and CO2 contaminations. Complete depolymerization of different types of PET‐based plastic waste was also achieved with high carbon yield (∼98 %) for disodium terephthalate (Na2TPA, 5.2 mmol/gPET) and sodium formate (SF, 9.6 mmol/gPET), along with H2 gas. Moreover, the developed process is scalable to bulk‐level production of hydrogen gas from PET‐based plastic waste, highlighting the potential application of the developed process.