Carbon fiber is a wondrous material, but it has some shortcomings including the fact that it isn’t that easy to recycle. However, last week came word that the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory was working on a way to transform used plastic bags into carbon fiber, and this composite could even be fine-tuned, allowing different types of carbon fiber to be created for specific applications.
A paper on the research was recently published in the journal Advanced Materials, and it seems that the team has been working with polyethylene-base fibers, which could come from waste plastic sources, including shopping bags or even carpet backing scraps. The process involves using a “a multi-component melt extrusion-based fiber spinning method,” which would allow the fibers to be customized, and their diameter can be manipulated with submicron precision.
The remaining question is whether used carbon fiber could be recycled to plastic, which in turn could then be transformed back in carbon fiber. That would certainly solve the material’s biggest shortcoming.