This reaction turns Teflon into toothpaste’s key ingredient

Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) is one of those chemical innovations that has gone from wonder material to societal scourge. Better known by its brand name, Teflon, PTFE is remarkably unreactive and can withstand high temperatures, which makes it excellent for use in nonstick cookware, industrial and medical coatings, and electronic insulation and as seals and gaskets when using harsh chemicals—an early use of PTFE was to prevent uranium hexafluoride leaks during the Manhattan Project. But the same chemistry that makes PTFE durable also makes it a persistent pollutant when it winds up in landfills, where it resists decomposition for thousands of years. In the past year, several research groups have reported methods for upcycling PTFE into useful chemicals. The latest work in this area comes from chemists led by Roly J. Armstrong at Newcastle University and Erli Lu and Dominik J. Kubicki at the University of Birmingham. The team developed a process that transforms PTFE into sodium fluoride and amorphous carbon (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2025, DOI: 10.1021/jacs.5c14052).“We’re taking Teflon and turning it into a component of toothpaste,” Armstrong says.The chemists use a ball mill to grind chunks of sodium metal together with PTFE in what’s known as a mechanochemical reaction. Because the reaction uses no solvents and has no by-products, it’s environmentally friendly and has 100% atom economy. Other PTFE-upcycling reactions that have been reported to date use organic solvents or complex catalysts, or they create by-products.“Our chemistry is very simple,” Lu says. “We can make use of the carbon produced