Filtering Material Offers Greener, Cheaper way to Make Plastic
GAITHERSBURG, MD—Created by a team including scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, an advanced filtering material 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 have repeatedly demonstrated a talent for separating individual hydrocarbons from the soup of organic molecules produced by oil refining processes.
In today's issue of the journal Science, the research team reveals that a modification to a well-studied MOF enables it to separate purified ethylene out of a mixture with ethane. The team's creation—built at The University of Texas at San Antonio and China's Taiyuan University of Technology and studied at the NIST Center for Neutron Research (NCNR)—represents a major step forward for the field.