Most plastic waste is contaminated – our new ‘nano’ recycling tech embraces this messy reality

Conor Boland (right) with colleague James Carton in the lab, Kyran O'Brien/Dublin City University, CC BY-NC-ND

A plastic drinks bottle is one of the most “recyclable” objects in the modern waste stream. It is lightweight and collected in huge volumes. Yet even for this item, the reality of recycling is messy: labels, inks, caps, food residues, colourants and the occasional wrong plastic all get bundled together. The chemistry may be simple, but the waste is not.

My team is developing a new way to deal with contaminated plastic waste.