I don’t have the background to know if this is real hope or a scam for funding, but it looked interesting. I do know that Toluene is a very real chemical which is used in manufacturing.
Probably not a scam, I’ve found Phys.org to be fairly good and honest in reporting. But for every advance report of sodium batteries, they report probably 9 breakthroughs that never come to market, or at least not within 10 years.
It doesn’t have to be one or the other. There’s always new techniques being developed in labs and workshops around the world, but it’s a matter of whether they can be scaled up economically to beat virgin plastic or other recycling methods.
(Plastics) recycling is overwhelmingly a feel-good government greenwashing effort, with minimal real-world recycling actually taking place. From one OECD report:
After taking into account losses during recycling, only 9% of plastic waste was ultimately recycled, while 19% was incinerated and almost 50% went to sanitary landfills. The remaining 22% was disposed of in uncontrolled dumpsites, burned in open pits or leaked into the environment.
Maybe this can help divert a small part of that 19% incinerated. But chances are it’ll be just like What_Exit said: just another novel technique that never makes it out of the lab and into the market.
Virgin plastic is just too cheap and nobody really cares enough about the plastic waste stream to actually do anything about it beyond virtue signaling.
Questions that come to mind include what byproducts in addition to toluene come out of this process, and how are they disposed of?
Whether there’s enough of a market for toluene produced by large-scale plastics recycling is another subject.