Drawbacks are mostly the economics of it. You have to convince people to put time and energy into turning waste into monomers. If the monomers you get from crude oil are cheaper, you’ve got an uphill battle.
The catalysts can be complex, but the good ones are really simple. The zinc one in this article is pretty easy to understand. Ours was an organic molecule, but a really abundant and cheap one. (We could easily recover and re-use the catalyst, too, which I also doubt most of the metal salt catalysts are capable of). Part of the project was optimizing that catalyst. We found ones that worked a little better, but were like 10x as expensive. So we just used a little more of the simple one and figured out how to use it over and over.
So, what’s the drawback of depolymerization? Sounds cool. Does it use baby tears as a catalyst?
Drawbacks are mostly the economics of it. You have to convince people to put time and energy into turning waste into monomers. If the monomers you get from crude oil are cheaper, you’ve got an uphill battle.
The catalysts can be complex, but the good ones are really simple. The zinc one in this article is pretty easy to understand. Ours was an organic molecule, but a really abundant and cheap one. (We could easily recover and re-use the catalyst, too, which I also doubt most of the metal salt catalysts are capable of). Part of the project was optimizing that catalyst. We found ones that worked a little better, but were like 10x as expensive. So we just used a little more of the simple one and figured out how to use it over and over.