Research into plastic recycling with sulphated zirconium oxide took an interesting fundamental turn when a team of Dutch and American chemists found signs of transient superacidity, as reported in Angewandte Chemie International Edition.

‘Our group has been collaborating with the group of Matthew Conley from the University of California, Riverside for years’, says Evgeny Pidko, Professor of Inorganic Systems Engineering at the TU Delft. ‘They shared a very unusual case with us about some of their organometallic surface chemistry experiments with zirconium.’

Conley and his colleagues were working on breaking down polypropylene and polyethylene into smaller pieces with sulphated zirconium oxides (SZO). ‘They got small hydrocarbons, which could find a use in aviation fuels’, says Pidko. ‘However, they didn’t quite understand how the C-H bonds were activated .’