Xin Ying KONG

The indispensable role of plastic in our daily lives has made the recycling of plastic waste an urgent issue. Despite many research efforts that have been devoted to recycling plastic waste, most non-biodegradable plastics are still not recycled in an eco-friendly manner.

In this context, the development of a novel approach to sustainably upcycle a wide range of plastic wastes into high-value chemical feedstocks at mild conditions is highly desirable, yet very challenging. Xin Ying Kong, a researcher at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, has been dedicated to research in this field.

Recently, Xin Ying and her team successfully developed a novel and green approach to photocatalytically upcycle a wide range of non-biodegradable plastics into valuable chemical feedstocks at ambient conditions – room temperature and atmospheric pressure using visible light as the only source of energy input. 

With much process studies and optimizations, they demonstrated that their developed organocatalysts act as chemical scissors to selectively cleave the highly stable C–C bonds in plastics, breaking down the plastics into value-added formic acid, acetic acid, and benzoic acid, successfully realizing plastic upcycling in a metal-free catalytic system.  

Currently, her team has managed to upcycle a wide range of plastics, covering resin codes 1–7, into fuels and valuable chemicals at ambient conditions. In addition to conventional plastics, their technology can also upcycle co-polymers, multilayered packaging, mixed plastics, and contaminated real-life plastic waste into value-added compounds. It is worth mentioning that the raw materials used to synthesize the catalyst are abundant, non-toxic, metal free, and cost-effective.