Material Could Make Plastic Manufacturing More Energy-Efficient

Anew material was developed that can extract the key ingredient in the most common form of plastic from a mixture of other chemicals while consuming far less energy than usual. The material is a metal-organic framework (MOF), a class of substances that has repeatedly demonstrated a talent for separating individual hydrocarbons from organic molecules produced by oil-refining processes. MOFs hold immense value for the plastic and petroleum industries because of this capability, which could allow manufacturers to perform these separations far more cheaply than standard oil-refinement techniques.