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# One cheap powder, a little heat, and acrylic glass comes apart into something new
- URL: https://www.earthtoseanews.com/acrylic-glass/
- Published: 2026-10-24T12:16:27.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-24T13:09:42.000Z
- Description: Acrylic glass is in car tail lights, window panes, furniture, signs and fish tanks, and most of it has nowhere good to go at the end of its life. A Zurich lab has found a cheap, simple way to take it apart and make it new again.
- Author: Nicole McMahon
- Tags: Innovations, All stories

Acrylic glass, the clear plastic sold as Plexiglas or Perspex, is everywhere once you start looking: tail lights, window panes, furniture, shop signs, the walls of an aquarium. Making it new from old has been hard, because the usual route is to cook it above 400 degrees, which costs a lot of energy and leaves up to three per cent of impurities in what comes out, so the recycled material is never quite as good as the first time round. At ETH Zurich, Professor Athina Anastasaki's group has found a gentler way, published in Nature Chemistry in September and announced by ETH Zurich this week, with Richard Whitfield as lead author. Add a single, inexpensive, commercially available reagent, warm the acrylic to just over 200 degrees, and the long polymer chains unzip themselves back into their building blocks, the monomers, with no solvent needed and nothing more to do. Up to 98 per cent comes back, and it comes back clean, even when the starting material is dyed or dirty. Those monomers make new acrylic of the same quality as the original.

![Overlapping sheets of coloured translucent plastic](https://storage.ghost.io/c/0d/06/0d067be9-327f-4730-b9c3-5f0cdd2bc6fa/content/images/2026/10/acrylic-glass-inside.jpg)

Sheets of coloured translucent plastic. Photo: Unsplash.

What makes the chemists happiest is how ordinary the method is. It runs on equipment factories already own, at temperatures they already use, with a reagent they can already buy, which is why ETH Zurich has filed a patent and is looking for companies to take it up. Professors Tae-Lim Choi and Gunnar Jeschke helped find the reagent, from a family of compounds called N-hydroxyimides. Next on the team's list is to scale the process up, understand exactly how the reaction works, and try the same trick on polystyrene, the foam of takeaway cups and packaging. For now the result is a clear plastic that can be made, used, taken apart and made again, as many times as anyone likes.

### Sources and links

Our short take: the full story is from ETH Zurich's news release (19 October 2026, published via Mirage News) and the paper in Nature Chemistry.

- [New method makes acrylic glass recycling profitable, ETH Zurich](https://www.miragenews.com/new-method-makes-acrylic-glass-recycling-1762576/) The reagent, the temperatures, the 98 per cent, the patent.
- [Lower temperature bulk depolymerization of commercial polymethacrylates, Nature Chemistry](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41557-026-02232-4) The paper, published 2 September 2026.