New Scientist writes that the new process can break down the plastic products in their original building blocks, while preserving the properties of the virgin material, marking a big step towards a circular approach in the industry.

According to a study published in Science, since 1950, the world has sent around 5 billion tons of plastic products to the landfills, while we were able to recycle only 9% of what was produced. Despite recycling efforts and technologies advancing over the recent years, plastic products are still ending up in landfills after only a few reprocessing cycles.

Researcher John Hartwig at the University of California, Berkeley and his team previously developed an innovative process that allows for breaking the plastic down into its building blocks, but that process used very expensive and rare metals, such as iridium and palladium. Furthermore, during the recycling process, these metals were slowly lost, with no hope of recovering them.

The leading researcher concluded that the technology served its purpose for an "academic paper, for demonstration purposes, but nowhere near what you would need for something that could be conceived of ever becoming industrial."

The same team didn't give up on the research and now discovered new catalysts that are considered much cheaper and easily-sourced, which can process both soft and hard types of plastic, essentially those from which bags and bottles are being made.

The two catalysts used now, sodium on aluminum oxide and tungsten oxide on silica, can break down the plastic with an efficiency of up to 90%.

Benjamin Ward at Cardiff University in the UK, who didn't participate in the study, said that the reason why modern-day plastics are difficult to recycle, in particular, is because additives and dyes make up as much as a third of the end products, discouraging companies from reprocessing them.

Hartwig added that, because of this, the new process developed by his team could have trouble processing certain plastics, as it has only been tested on products with a few and common additives. For more complex products he said that "we need to either find a way to separate those, which is maybe not optimal, or to find different catalyst structures or compositions that will be more resistant to some of those additives. That is absolutely a challenge."