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Excessive production of waste polyethylene terephthalate (PET) poses an ecological challenge, which necessitates developing technologies to extract the values from end-of-life PET. Upcycling has proven effective in addressing the low profitability of current recycling strategies, yet existing upcycling technologies operate under energy-intensive conditions. Here we report a cascade strategy to steer the transformation of PET waste into glycolate in an overall yield of 92.6% under ambient conditions. The cascade approach involves setting up a robust hydrolase with 95.6% PET depolymerization into ethylene glycol (EG) monomer within 12 h, followed by an electrochemical process initiated by a CO-tolerant Pd/Ni(OH)
Du et al. (Fri,) studied this question.