IBM for pet recycling

Everyone agrees that plastic PET bottles need to be reused and recycled in some way or another, in the best interests of the environment. Plastics bottles are used widely, and to have them fill up landfills would be nothing short of an environmental catastrophe. That is why most cities like to recycle plastic or PET bottles and convert them into various types of substances. But till now, it was quite expensive to convert PET bottles into recycled PET bottles. The process was quite expensive and not economically viable, due to which this option has been hitherto summarily rejected by industry.
Now the situation is set to change, since IBM as well as Stanford have come up with a way in which the polymers in plastic bottles can be recycled such that these can be reused in order to be used for bottles again. This has been the subject of intense research such that it has become possible to imitate nature, wherein there will be widespread use of a carbene, which is a catalyst that helps in connecting esters such that long polymers can be made.
The method works as when bottles to be reused are placed in the heated solution along with the catalyst, which is able to act on the constituents of the bottle in order to recreate the PET material which can be fashioned into new bottles. This method has taken as much as 10 years to be developed and it involved a kind of accidental discovery or serendipity where the technology used by IBM in insulating computer chips was used to create the catalyst for Pet material recycling.
Now that the experimental results of recycling PET material have proved to be encouraging, efforts are on to commercially introduce and utilize the technology. This technology has the potential to reverse the harmful effects of plastic to a very large extent, with huge spin off benefits for environmental conservation.

http://www.greenoptimistic.com/2010/03/10/chemical-recycle-pet/