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Review demonstrates chemical catalytic pathways for valorizing discarded polycarbonate, highlighting direct upcycling strategies to bridge lab-scale chemistry and industrial plastic recycling.
The growing stock of post-consumer waste polycarbonate (PC) causes severe environmental pressure and resource loss, whereas conventional mechanical recycling, landfilling and incineration suffer from material deterioration and secondary pollution. Chemical catalytic recycling enables selective carbonate-ester-bond cleavage for value-added production and serves as a promising circular-valorization strategy for waste PC. This review covers three core technical branches: BPA-targeted catalytic depolymerization, fuel production via hydrodeoxygenation and pyrolysis, and high-value chemical upgrading including reductive depolymerization and direct-upcycling. Representative depolymerization catalysts are critically compared regarding mechanisms, conditions, recyclability and practical performance. We highlight the performance gap between neat model-PC lab tests and impurity-bearing real-world waste PC, and differentiate conventional “depolymerization–isolation–repolymerization” closed-loop workflows from monomer-purification-bypassed direct-upcycling routes. Key technical trade-offs, bottlenecks and scenario-oriented suggestions are summarized to support the lab-to-industrial circular recycling of waste PC toward carbon-neutrality goals.
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Miao et al. (2026) studied this question.
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