(619f) Calculated Physicochemical Properties of Glycerol-Derived Solvents to Drive Plastic Waste Recycling

Plastics serve modern life in several ways, but their extensive use and mismanagement of the accompanying waste contributes to the accumulation of plastic waste in landfills or in the natural environment. A promising method of combating plastic waste is solvent-based recycling which uses a solvent to selectively dissolve plastic material which can then be recovered and reprocessed into upcycled products. In this work, we propose the functionalization of glycerol, a natural product from biomass as well as a byproduct of biodiesel production, that can produce new and potentially less harmful solvents capable of dissolving plastic waste while also overcoming the health and environmental hazards of commonly used solvents. In this work, we have developed a database of ~10,000 glycerol-based solvents and calculated their physical properties such as the dipole moment, density, melting point, LogS, LogP, and Hansen Solubility Parameters (HSPs) using a combination of Density Functional Theory, machine learning and Hansen theory. We show that the physical properties can be tuned based on the attached functional groups and based on the HSPs of the solvents and selected plastics in addition to the melting point of the solvents, we give recommendations for solvents that can carry out selective plastic dissolution for a complex plastic waste feedstock (Ind. Eng. Chem. Res., 62, 6322-6337 2023. DOI: 10.1021/acs.iecr.2c04567). We also highlight successful experimental verification, for example the selective dissolution of polystyrene in glycerol-derived solvents at room temperature.