The
accumulation of plastic waste in the environment has prompted
the development of new chemical recycling technologies. A recently
reported approach employed homogeneous organometallic catalysts for
tandem dehydrogenation and olefin cross metathesis to depolymerize
polyethylene (PE) feedstocks to a mixture of alkane products. Here,
we build on that prior work by developing a fully heterogeneous catalyst
system using a physical mixture of SnPt/γ-Al2O3 and Re2O7/γ-Al2O3. This heterogeneous catalyst system produces a distribution
of linear alkane products from a model, linear C20 alkane, n-eicosane, and from a linear PE substrate (which is representative
of high-density polyethylene), both in an n-pentane
solvent. For the PE substrate, a molecular weight decrease of 73%
was observed at 200 °C in 15 h. This type of tandem chemistry
is an example of an olefin-intermediate process, in which poorly reactive
aliphatic substrates are first activated through dehydrogenation and
then functionalized or cleaved by a highly-active olefin catalyst.
Olefin-intermediate processes like that examined here offer both a
selective and versatile means to depolymerize polyolefins at lower
severity than traditional pyrolysis or cracking conditions.