The majority of plastics today wind up in landfills or are, at best, recycled into materials that have a very limited range of applications. To address this problem, chemist Guoliang Liu and colleagues designed a reactor that melts polyethylene and polypropylene—two widely used plastics—into a wax. The wax can then be transformed into a surfactant (a chemical compound usable as a detergent). With this promising new method, plastic waste could be turned into a range of useful cleaning products.

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