Earth-abundant metal oxide nanoparticles catalyze carbon-carbon bond hydrogenolysis

From 1950 to 2015, 4900 million metric tons (MMT) of virgin plastics were discarded in landfills or the natural environment. This number will keep increasing since more than 350 million metric tons of plastics are produced yearly, of which around 79% are quickly discarded. These plastic wastes have raised increasing environmental and health concerns. Meanwhile, plastic wastes contain significant amounts of energy and carbon, which could be used as feedstock for the current chemical industry. Increasing efforts have been devoted to chemically upcycling, converting plastic wastes to high-value chemicals, which is considered to be the most promising strategy to address the waste plastic crisis. We discovered that the earth-abundant metal oxide nanoparticles catalytically cleave the C-C bond in polyethylene to a narrow distribution of small hydrocarbon molecules. We performed extensive structure characterization and employed density functional theory calculations to understand the structure of the catalysts, active sites, and reaction pathways.