A new life for plastic. Imagine that…
This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science.
PET is a common plastic in water bottles. Recycling it is costly and energy intensive! How can we make better use of it?
Enter Pavel Kulyabin and team from the University of St. Andrews. They came up with a one step solution to convert PET into EHMB – a key component in several anticancer drugs.
Currently, EHMB production is ALSO wasteful and expensive. But! Using JUST five grams of recycled PET plastic, the team produced eighty percent yield of EHMB!
This new approach lowers environmental impact and reduces the carbon footprint.
So keep on recycling!
Reference: Kulyabin, P. S., Luk, J., Uslamin, E. A., Kolganov, A. A., Saini, G., Marcial‐Hernandez, R., Pancholi, K., Kühne, B., Dauth, A., McKay, A. P., Cordes, D. B., Pidko, E. A., & Kumar, A. (2025). From Plastic Waste to Pharmaceutical Precursors: PET Upcycling Through Ruthenium Catalyzed Semi‐Hydrogenation. Angewandte Chemie International Edition, e21838–e21838. https://doi.org/10.1002/anie.202521838