【Frontiers in HaiChuan Chemical Technology】The team specializing in thermophysics under extreme conditions and energy systems at the School of Energy and Power Engineering of Dalian University of Technology is working in the field of depolymerization of polyolefin waste plastics

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Recently, Professor Tang Dawei and Associate Professor Jiang Bo from the team specializing in thermophysics under extreme conditions and energy systems at the School of Energy and Power Engineering of Dalian University of Technology have made significant progress in the field of depolymerization of polyolefin waste plastics. The widespread use of plastic products brings great convenience to modern society, but their difficulty in undergoing natural degradation has also led to an increasingly severe global environmental crisis. Currently, the global recycling rate of waste plastics is less than 10%. This is especially true for polyolefin plastics, which account for over 77% of global plastic production; their chemical inertness poses challenges to traditional recycling methods, resulting in low yields and poor product stability. To this end, the research team proposed an innovative entropy regulation strategy; by inducing interface enrichment at the active sites and optimizing the electronic structure, they successfully developed a medium-entropy GaInNiSn liquid alloy catalyst. This catalyst utilizes Niδ⁻–Snδ⁺ active sites formed on dynamic Ga interfaces to activate the C–H bonds in the inert main chains of polyolefins and facilitate β-scission, thereby depolymerizing polyolefin plastics into light olefins under atmospheric pressure without consuming co-reactants. It achieves a light olefin selectivity of 79.7% and a space-time yield of 181.5 mmol gcat⁻1 h⁻1, which is one order of magnitude higher than that of existing technologies. The research team further developed a photovoltaic-driven outdoor depolymerization system, which maintained a light olefin yield of 52.8 L h⁻¹ during continuous operation for over 120 hours, providing an efficient and sustainable solution for the recycling of waste plastics. The relevant findings were published in Nature Communications under the title “Interfacial configurational entropy tuning strategy enabling liquid alloys for efficient depolymerization of polyolefin waste”. Xu Chaoping, a doctoral student from the School of Energy and Power Engineering of our university, served as the first author, while Associate Professor Jiang Bo, Professor Zhang Xiao, and Professor Tang Dawei were the corresponding authors. This research was funded by the **Key Research and Development Program**. Paper link: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-70325-2.