Person
Alexandra Markus
B.Sc.Address
Building: Sammelbau Chemie
Room: 38C 330
Worringerweg 2
52074 Aachen
Research
Plastic is in many everyday consumer items. This creates millions of tons of waste annually, almost half of which ends up in landfills. Only about 9% of plastic waste is recycled, with 99+% being mechanically recycled at the moment. Here, the quality of the material deteriorates with each cycle.
Another idea is to chemically break down the polymers to repolymerize the resulting building blocks or further process them into basic chemicals. One method for this is electrochemical depolymerization, which uses electricity to break down the polymers. The mechanism of electrochemical depolymerization of a polyester and the influences of the reaction conditions are studied.