Waste plastics become molecular sponges that capture water from air

Discarded plastic packaging materials, old CDs and even LEGO bricks can be transformed into materials that capture significant amounts of moisture from the air. Materials chemists Anastasiia Naryshkina, Paul Schweng and Robert Woodward at the University of Vienna have converted several types of plastic waste into water-attracting polymer networks that take up water even in dry climates and release it again under moderate heating, for example, using sunlight. The study, published in Chem Circularity, offers a route to give plastic waste a second life as an adsorbent for atmospheric water harvesting.