(CAPITOL CITY NOW) – You think you’re doing the right thing by recycling — especially plastics. But of the plastic turned in to the recyclers, only about ten percent actually gets recycled. University of Illinois chemical and biomolecular engineering professor Baron Peters says for the most part, there’s no market for what we set out by the curb.

What’s more, “virgin plastic is very cheap,” Peters said. “Making it fresh from new petroleum is a cheap thing to do, and you can control the process doing it that way.

“But I think there’s no reason that we can’t come up with competitive processes that start from plastic as a starting point.”

Peters and his team are using reactor models to try to show a path forward for more efficient plastic recycling.