Plastic waste is piling up around the world, choking landfills and polluting ecosystems.
But a team of Yale researchers has found a promising new way to turn that trash into something useful—fuel and other valuable chemicals—without relying on costly or short-lived materials.
The team, led by Professors Liangbing Hu and Shu Hu from Yale’s Center for Materials Innovation and Yale Energy Sciences Institute, has developed a method that uses heat, not chemicals, to break down plastic.
The process is called pyrolysis, where plastic is heated in the absence of oxygen until its molecular structure breaks apart. These broken-down pieces can then be turned into fuels and other products.
While pyrolysis isn’t new, it usually relies on catalysts—substances that help speed up chemical reactions. But catalysts are expensive and don’t last forever.
Over time, they stop working due to contamination or degradation, which makes traditional pyrolysis less practical for large-scale waste management.
What makes this new system different is that it doesn’t need a catalyst at all. Instead, the researchers built a clever 3D-printed device that controls the chemical reactions through structure and heat alone.
This device is a column made of carbon with three sections, each having smaller and smaller pores: from one millimeter to 500 micrometers to 200 nanometers.
As the plastic breaks down and flows through these sections, the design ensures that larger molecules don’t move forward until they’re fully decomposed. This helps make the process cleaner and more efficient.
By controlling the temperature inside the reactor, the design also prevents a common problem called coking—when leftover materials build up and block the system. As a result, the team achieved a record-high conversion rate: nearly 66% of polyethylene plastic waste was turned into useful fuel-like chemicals.
To test if their idea could work beyond the lab, the team also tried using a simpler version made from commercially available carbon felt instead of a custom 3D-printed device. Even without the precision structure, this version still converted over 56% of the plastic into valuable products—a result that suggests this system could be scaled up for real-world use.
“This gives us a powerful, low-cost way to recycle plastic waste,” said Professor Shu Hu. “Our method shows that we can make valuable chemicals from plastic without relying on expensive or fragile materials. That’s a big step toward making plastic recycling more efficient and sustainable.”
The findings were published in Nature Chemical Engineering and point to a future where today’s plastic problems might become tomorrow’s fuel solutions.
Source: Yale University.
