Overall this sounds exciting - I love the idea of integrating recycling and upcycling across different domains. Regarding the idea of repurposing the polyethylene terephthalate waste from...
Overall this sounds exciting - I love the idea of integrating recycling and upcycling across different domains.
Regarding the idea of repurposing the polyethylene terephthalate waste from landfills/plastic pollution, is it feasible to source the plastic waste? I have no idea about the processes involved here, but I'm wondering if there are any cleaning/purifying procedures that would have to be done that this article glosses over which might make this much more costly than anticipated. Not that it wouldn't be worth it - often it seems doing the sustainable thing is more costly than doing the easy approach.
Another question I have is what about any by-products from the conversion of polyethylene terephthalate into the substrate for the initial reaction, terephthalic acid, as well as the intermediary steps along the way to creating L-DOPA. I checked out the primary source and saw that they don't have a clear solution for that yet, so this probably has some time before we could start handing out L-DOPA made from plastic to Parkinson's patients, but it is a great proof of concept.
Overall this sounds exciting - I love the idea of integrating recycling and upcycling across different domains.
Regarding the idea of repurposing the polyethylene terephthalate waste from landfills/plastic pollution, is it feasible to source the plastic waste? I have no idea about the processes involved here, but I'm wondering if there are any cleaning/purifying procedures that would have to be done that this article glosses over which might make this much more costly than anticipated. Not that it wouldn't be worth it - often it seems doing the sustainable thing is more costly than doing the easy approach.
Another question I have is what about any by-products from the conversion of polyethylene terephthalate into the substrate for the initial reaction, terephthalic acid, as well as the intermediary steps along the way to creating L-DOPA. I checked out the primary source and saw that they don't have a clear solution for that yet, so this probably has some time before we could start handing out L-DOPA made from plastic to Parkinson's patients, but it is a great proof of concept.