Recycling polystyrene to make styrene 

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That's how it's done, kids. I once read of a chemist that had a patent for a catalyst, which he couldn't sell or lease. He had a kid who was a newly minted lawyer. The chemist and lawyer made a deal in which the State of New Jersey offered, under contract, to sell, at a minimal cost to the newly formed chemist/lawyer company, what amounted to be empty milk bottles. Truck loads of crushed gallon milk bottles. The company rented a pier on the Jersey shore and set up a pyrolytic converter fitted with the cited catalyst, and like magic, lawyers from other chemical companies started showing up, hats in hand, soliciting the first company to sell those of the second companies products of the first company's rig. It turned out that a converter would have been enough to attract the second batch of lawyers as pyrolylsis, while messy, is famously profitable, but with the cited catalyst was some 30% more efficient in converting to some specific products. Some serious Ka-ching. Last I heard was that the State of New Jersey wanted to renegotiate the first contract for a bigger piece of the pie, in a manner of speaking.

Nice! I heard acrylic pyrolysis gives methyl methacrylate as well so that could be interesting. Also the radical mechanisms here are pretty interesting.

Your voiceovers are getting alot better! Not implying it was bad before, before was fine but this one was quite good! I might try this someday, I thought i'd have to buy styrene to make polystyrene or decompose Cinnimic acid...

Honestly benzene is one of my favorite chemical to use ant I have used the method to extract benzene from sodium benzoate and it worked and I burned that benzene for fun

I have always wanted to try that at such a large scale. Nice video! :)

well done. I once tried to make styrene by dehydratation of 1-Phenylethanol with H2SO4. I mixed it together, heated and tried to distill styrene. I ended up with black dense mud and not even one drop of styrene. :D

I did this a few years ago. I was able to re-polymerise it using fiber glassing activator (MEK peroxide) and some mild heating. The product was hard but brittle, but It had impurities in with the styrene. Next time I will use some Magnesium Oxide in the pyrolysis retort. I read in a paper the MgO improves the yield to favor styrene.

Nice video as always

Now all you need to do is epoxidize the monomer and reflux with an excess of acid, follow that up with distillation and then react the aldehyde with MeNH3 followed by vigorous drying. Then finally finish off by reacting the aldimine with methyl magnesium halide (Grignard reagent).

Thank you that you took my video suggestion into consideration! Pyrolysis of various plastics has always been one of my favorite reactions and this video was excellent, lets get this man 10000 subscribers please!

My friend did alot of research on this subject. He too is a chemist from Germany

well done, i need to rty this with some of my degasified styrofoam ive collected in my D-limonene bucket. (probably about 30 coolers and a garbage sack of pellets.

If there's another fuel crisis we may have to end up recycling polystyrene to burn the monomer in diesel engines...it's actually a very good fuel.

Waiting for this

Did the same 24 years ago, same setup, only used copper tube. Also did methyl methacrylate, and then methacrylic acid, which was a stinky mistake. Thanks for the video!

amazing try extracting gold from random stuffs you wouldnt expect

Nice sehr tolles Video

I remember when I was a kid a major drug lab got found because they were buying Styrofoam cups

Poggers!

So unusual to se the final product not be yellow like Ex&F usually gets 😅

When you use the paint can for benzene should you be left with quite allot of solid at the end that should be hammered out or have I not run the reaction for long enough?

Interesting. When will you make the video about making potassium?

so if were actually using this for fuel and not a chemistry project, what kind of inhibitors do you recommend to prevent polymerization? I expect vitamin c would probably cause more fouling than fresh styrene

Interesting. At the beginning of the video there's a stain on your table. It looks like the outline of a salamander or lizard. Like it was just drying off and left a dirty imprint...

Is it possible to create a homemade photoresist out of this distilled styrene? Since it polymerizes under UV.

can this technology be scaled to do large recycling of polystyrene rubbish?

I have a question: I know you should not o this, but I'm just wondering what styrene smells like. Also, thank you for the video, pyrolysis is quite cool and interesting!

Maybe I'm stupid but to me it seemed like the first setup was a "closed apparatus", i.e. the fumes generated by the pyrolysis had nowhere to escape? Or did I just not see a vent in the collectorflask?

Do one on ketones

cool

i dont quite think ptfe sealant is a good choice at those temperatures :P

+ THYZOID LABORATORIES If I had to guess, you would probably be turning styrene into benzoic acid.

You could make this into a fuel.

Hmm make a different type of plastic if you can.

What is the purpose of doing this, why would someone want styrene?

At 0:28 min you probably meant benzene

Conduct a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the resulting liquid - there is less than 40% styrene. Yeald - bull shit.