Dr. Jason Bara, a professor in the College of Engineering, leads a team at The University of Alabama working to improve methods to recycle the ubiquitous plastics we interact with daily. Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) is a common plastic that responds well to chemolysis, a chemical process that depolymerizes plastic for recycling. Much of the previous work on chemolysis and PET has focused on water, alcohols, and amines.聽 Amines are a group of compounds derived from ammonia and are especially effective for PET depolymerization, but most products formed from the aminolysis of PET have limited uses, Bara said.
Nothing in the literature pointed to the effectiveness of imidazoles in this process. Imidazole, and its related compounds, are a group of organic molecules that are used in a wide range of applications and even appear within biologically important compounds. 鈥淚鈥檝e been working with imidazole for much of my career,鈥� said Bara. 鈥淚t鈥檚 pretty amazing how versatile it is.鈥�
Bara had been working for two years with using amines to break down plastics as part of a National Science Foundation grant geared toward reducing plastic waste. His appreciation for imidazole鈥檚 versatility made it a natural extension to see what happened when he tried using it for chemolysis. 鈥淢y student came back into the lab and said oh 鈥� the plastic is gone. It鈥檚 all gone.鈥�