Nick Petrichow

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224 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 5 Aug

Nick Petrichow’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.

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Nature Podcast · Junk plastic turns into high-value commodity with chemistry trick · 5 Aug 2026 podcast

Nature.

Welcome back to the Nature Podcast.

This week, how to turn a plastic into a lubricant

This week in nature, researchers have shown that a common plastic can be turned into a lubricant rather than heading to landfill.

The plastic in question is polyvinyl chloride, better known as PVC.

The poly may give you a clue to its structure, if you remember your high school chemistry, is made up of hydrocarbons, carbon and hydrogen atoms with a chlorine atom on the side, repeated many, many times in a long chain.

This relatively simple structure belies how versatile it is, coming in harder and more flexible forms.

That means it's everywhere, it's in pipes, doors, bottles, packaging, and probably in your pockets, as it's often the plastic of choice to make credit cards.

But while it's useful for making a lot of products, there is the question of what to do with it at the end of its life.

It can be recycled, but the process is difficult, and in many cases the resulting recycled products aren't worth much more than the original PVC, meaning that a lot of it just ends up in landfill.

This new work though may show a way to make a much more valuable product out of PVC and therefore give an economic incentive to recycle it.

That product, lubricant.

And by lubricant, I mean the kind you put on your car.

This lubricant, often made from a chemical called polyalpha olefin, can fetch a price of 3200 to 6000 USD per metric tonne.

Much higher than the perhaps one thousand dollars per metric tonne the PVC is worth.

I called up Greg Lou, one of the authors behind this transformative work, to learn more about his lubricant making process, and he told me how he and his team got started in tackling the

And so tell us what is the idea?

What did you want to do to to not turn them into plastic but to turn them into what else?

But the question I suppose is how does one turn PVC into said lubricant?

So how did you actually go about doing it?

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