We encounter them every day. PET bottles and PET packaging first pass through stores, then our households, and used ones end up (in the best case) in sorted waste containers, but also accumulate in landfills around the world. What to do with them? 
Most unsorted PET materials (bottles, carpets, textiles) are currently disposed of by incineration, which is certainly not a very desirable situation. Therefore, new methods of their environmentally friendly disposal or recycling possibilities are constantly being sought. Czech scientists from the Institute of Chemical Process Fundamentals of the Czech Academy of Sciences also sought a solution to this problem and developed a completely unique technology: they decomposed the durable material using microwave radiation into pure raw material that can be reused. "It took six years before we solved all the steps that were needed," said Ing. Milan Hájek, CSc., from the Institute of Chemical Process Fundamentals of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Years of research certainly paid off and bore good fruit. The developed method is almost waste-free and results in a product of high purity. Moreover, PET material does not need to be pre-sorted by color and does not need to be dried after washing. "One of the great advantages of the technology we designed is that it operates at normal pressure. This eliminates a whole range of complications in technological application," described Prof. Jiří Drahoš, President of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Disposal of PET material by conversion to raw material is ideal compared to other methods, and this is precisely the essence of the technology developed by Czech scientists, who thus contributed to making the adverse civilizational footprint we leave on our environment at least somewhat cleaner. Learn more from this video. ed, source Czech Academy of Sciences