Degradation of Residual Dyes from the Hydrolysis of PETE Plastic

Overview

Plastic pollution remains a problem, with over 170 trillion pieces of plastic in the world's oceans. A process that can efficiently degrade PETE plastic is hydrolysis, where the PETE is broken into its Terephthalic Acid and Ethylene Glycol monomers, which are the fundamental chemical building blocks that form plastics. TPA serves a commercial purpose in paints, pharmaceuticals, and environmental industries. While this useful, oftentimes harmful dyes remain in the obtained TPA, undegraded by the hydrolysis process. Green PETE plastics were degraded under neutral -hydrolysis conditions for 2 hours, after which TPA was produced. It was found that the UV degradation of the remaining dyes within the obtained TPA in the presence of TiO2 could be performed in a timely manner, with all samples reaching near 100% degradation within 30 minutes. The process produced statistically significant results, showing that TiO2 has an important role in the kinetics of dye degradation, with a rate order of 1. In addition, the degra dation proceeded the fastest in acidic conditions. Both of these processes can be easily industrialized, as TPA is naturally acidic and plastics contain TiO2 as a white additive. The research can lead to designing a concerted mechanism, where both plastic and dyes are degraded, yielding in a cost-effective, environmentally friendly process. Louisiana

Competition history

• JSHS 2024 Category not listed

Resources

• National JSHS abstract book ↗

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.