Waste PVC upcycling: Transferring unmanageable Cl species into value-added Cl-containing chemicals

The upcycling of waste polyvinyl chloride (PVC) is a grand challenge because of the unmanageable Cl species. Here, we develop a Cl-transfer strategy to upcycle waste PVC into value-added organic chlorides and PE-like polymer with various Cl acceptors (tetrahydrofuran, dibutyl ether and butanol) over Ru/Al2O3 catalyst. The high utilization efficiency of Cl (> 80 %) can be obtained over Ru/Al2O3 at 180 °C, 2Mpa H2 with tetrahydrofuran as an acceptor within tens of hours. The excellent performance is attributed to key features including Al2O3 for the C-O bond activation and metal Ru for C-Cl bond activation and H2 dissociation. The remaining PE-like polymer after removing Cl could be regarded as PE-like feedstock and further converted into methane through the same Ru/Al2O3 catalyst. The Cl-transfer system also enables the upcycling of several common PVC-contained wastes and works well in the scale-up test. This work offers a catalytic path to integrate waste PVC plastic into the supply chain of organic chlorides under the context of circular economy.