rob_lh

Not the LLM kind :)

Adding some personal analysis to your point, the last time I looked at plastic market research in detail, the two biggest markets by volume and revenue were packaging and insulation, which I believe were dominated by thermoplastics. Those are the big ones if you want to make an impact on plastic usage.

Also, pulling from memory that may not be quite right, but I recall roads taking a substantial amount of polymer additives and that tire degradation is a major source of microplastic exposure for humans. The tire problem is poised to get worse with EVs being so heavy and accelerating so hard that the tires are bigger and wear faster, but I'm not aware of even any promising research there besides more bio-based feedstocks to improve the sustainability.

Having worked in polymers and seen the development of some recyclable, 3D-printed thermosets like what's proposed here, I think this is a fair take. On the whole, I'm glad to see other researchers continuing to research the space.

There are a few big challenges to be managed. One is material diversity—it's cool they got it to work with one monomer (most thermosets are two that you mix together), but it's a long road to showing the process works well in just one application let alone. To make a substantial impact, the process would have to be suitable to a bunch of different applications, likely requiring different material properties that would require many different monomers.

Then we can talk about value. While the value of fully recycling plastic can be managed as an externality by government taxes/fees, the big question is how much it actually costs in energy, time, money, and material waste that somebody has to pay for—there's no free lunch here, and it's rolling all those costs back up into the product. I have been secretly hoping that automated waste sorting and excess solar capacity could be used to run such waste management processes and close the business case, but energy demand and prices seem to only be going up due to AI. Still, it's good there's another example of it being possible but a long road to really reducing single-use plastics.

>How is this problem anything resembling actionable, for normal people?

Vote

I'm the author, and I'm always deeply flattered when people submit my stuff. Thank you! Happy to chat more, as there was a ton of research that went into it, most of which didn't make the final cut.