New paper on the technical developments in plastic recycling

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Plastic is everywhere – and since less than 10% of it have been recycled so far, it probably will be for a very long time. However, recycling technologies are evolving – and Jakob Hoffmann and Johannes Glückler have looked closer into these developments.

Based on citation data from more than 100,000 patent applications and using main path analysis, they have explored patterns of historical dependence and independence in the development of the technical subdomains of textile recycling, separation techniques, and biological recycling.

Main findings

1. The comparison of the 3 development paths show that their cohesiveness and topical homogeneity correspond with the maturity and the organizational concentration of patenting activity: The recent approach of enzymatic recycling for example is topically homogeneous, dominated by a single patent portfolio, and it exhibits a strongly clustered main path structure. The application field of textiles on the other hand is more heterogeneous, with a more ‘long-armed’ main path network.
2. The approach sheds light on the sometimes dependent and sometimes independent technical development of related approaches towards a common problem: While there appears to be a strong historical dependence between textile recycling and separation techniques, biological recycling has mostly developed independently in its own niche.

Read the paper