Electrothermal Strategies for Upcycling Commodity Plastics

ABSTRACT Electrothermal upcycling of postconsumer plastic waste is attracting increasing attention amid the escalating global plastic pollution crisis, coupled with the widening availability of renewable electricity and the urgent need for a low‐carbon circular plastics economy. Representative electrothermal strategies, including plasma, microwave, Joule heating, and induction heating, emerge as promising alternatives to conventional upcycling routes, with unique merits in processing rate, product selectivity, and environmental compatibility. Nevertheless, systematic cross‐technique benchmarking and a holistic understanding of their scalability bottlenecks remain insufficient, hindering the transition from lab‐scale demonstrations to industrial implementation. Here, through a quantitative comparison of the four technologies across critical performance metrics, we demonstrate that induction heating exhibits excellent product selectivity and operational stability when processing real‐world mixed plastics. Furthermore, we identify energy consumption, catalyst activity and stability, and product value as key determinants for industrialization, while also revealing barriers to scaling up from the laboratory to the industrial level, including heat transfer losses and thermal nonuniformity in large reactors, limited adaptability to real‐world plastic waste streams, and inadequacies in current life cycle assessment frameworks. In view of the persistent challenges in this field, we outline two priority directions for future development: advanced catalyst design and artificial intelligence‐assisted process control and reactor optimization.