Acid recovered from spent lead-acid car batteries could be repurposed to enable a new route for recycling difficult plastic ...

It was an "almost accidental" discovery, the photocatalyst they invented turned out to be robust enough to withstand the battery acid.

The newly designed process is called solar-powered acid photoreforming.

Modern cars are quite advanced. Cars equipped with different levels of autonomous driving, for example, are among the most technologically advanced vehicles on the road today, as are EVs and hybrids.

Researchers have developed a solar-powered reactor to break down hard-to-recycle forms of plastic waste – such as drinks bottles, nylon textiles and polyurethane foams – using acid recovered from old ...