Plastic Bags Recycled into Nanotubes

Waste plastic from throwaway carrier bags can be readily converted into carbon nanotubes. The chemist who developed the technique has even used the nanotubes to make lithium-ion batteries. This is called upcycling — converting a waste product into something more valuable. Finding ways to upcycle waste could encourage more recycling: for instance, bacteria can convert plastic drinks bottles into a more expensive plastic. The carrier-bag-to-nanotube technique was developed by Vilas Ganpat Pol at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois and converts high or low-density polyethylene (HDPE and LDPE) into valuable multiwalled carbon nanotubes