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Greg Lu

Greg Lu

Professor of Chemistry at Virginia Tech researching polymer recycling, upcycling plastic waste into high-value chemicals and lubricants.

Aug 5, 2026

3:00
And so tell us, what is that idea? What did you want to do to, to not turn them into plastic, but to turn them into what else?
Greg Lu
Greg LuGUEST
3:06
At first, we were thinking about if it's poly vinyl chloride, if we can take all the hydrocarbon background, so maybe we can use as a backbone for linkage.
Greg Lu
Greg LuGUEST
3:17
And if we can attach something else to that, then we may be able to make a cross-linked PE version of, of material.
Greg Lu
Greg LuGUEST
3:25
The motivation there is actually very simple, right? Because PVC is widely used in pipes, and nowadays, especially in Europe and United States, and there are more pipes made of crossing the PE or XPE.
Greg Lu
Greg LuGUEST
3:38
So if we can take the old PVC pipes and make into XPE, that means we can still use them in piping and similar applications.
Greg Lu
Greg LuGUEST
3:47
So we tried a lot of times to make them into crossing materials, and we made some materials.
Greg Lu
Greg LuGUEST
3:51
It's some materials that potentially can be usable, but it's not the performance that we would like to be.
5:24
So what's the magic formula then? How would I take my PVC and turn it into a lubricant?

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