Cold sintering may rescue plastic, ceramics, battery components from landfills
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Recycling does not necessarily prevent an item from eventually ending up in a landfill, according to Enrique Gomez, interim associate dean for equity and inclusion and professor of chemical engineering in the Penn State College of Engineering. Instead, recycling simply delays its end of life. Plastic bottles that are recycled and then turned into carpet, for example, eventually end up in the landfill when the carpet gets worn out and is thrown away.
However, cold sintering—the process of combining powder-based materials into dense forms at low temperatures through applied pressure using solvents—allows for materials to be recycled again and again.
"That's the idea with cold sintering: you can take two or more materials that were destined for the landfill, combine them and create a composite, and recycle the composite again and again, without a loss in performance," Gomez said.
