Each year the world produces about 100 million tons of this multilayer plastic, which can’t be recycled with traditional methods, said George Huber, a professor of chemical engineering at UW-Madison who is developing techniques to separate those layers with solvents. “Plastics are a very complex chemical material,” Huber said. “There’s not one easy way to recycle all plastics.” As a result, only about 13% of consumer plastic actually gets recycled, Huber said. The rest ends up in landfills, incinerators and the ocean.
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