Green Chemistry and beverage bottles

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Green Chemistry and beverage bottles
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The job of green chemist

• Problem solver

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The problem with PET bottles

• Made from a non-renewable resource
• Do not biodegrade
• Do not recycle on a closed-loop system

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DMT
Lets start at the beginning
In the process of making the bottle, two dimers
are zipped together to form a polymer, like the
chain you made at the beginning of the lesson

• Ethylene Glycol

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This zipping produces a polymer (or many
monomers) to form the PET molecule
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Lifecycle of a PET beverage bottle
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Recycling can make this..
But we still use PET bottles so we are still
using petroleum
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What if the Lifecycle of a PET beverage bottle
looked like this
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In 1996 the DuPont Company won a presidential
Green Chemistry Award for Petretec -or the
unzipping of the polymers in PET
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Petretec chemical reaction
http//academic.scranton.edu/faculty/CANNM1/indust
rialchemistry/industrialchemistrymodule.html
The DuPont Company at their plant in North
Carolina uses this process to recover 100 million
lbs of PET annually
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Has the problem been solved?

• Made from a non-renewable resource
• The non-renewable resource is now renewable
• Do not biodegrade
• This would be solved if we could get everyone to
  a Petretec processing plant
• Do not recycle on a closed-loop system
• Petretec is a closed-loop recycling system