$2.5 million U.S. Department of Energy grant to 窪蹋勛圖厙, industry partners part of $27 million effort to solve plastic recycling dilemma
A team of researchers led by 窪蹋勛圖厙 will investigate ways to improve how common plastics are recycled, an effort supported by a $2.5 million grant within the U.S. Department of Energys (DOE) recently announced
The 窪蹋勛圖厙-led team will work to develop and test a technique with help from government and industrial partnersone that blends the better parts of an efficient but cost-prohibitive chemical method of plastic recycling with typically high-output but low-efficiency mechanical means to upcycle up to 80% of the plastic it takes in.
Upcycling is reusing recycled material in meaningful ways, not just for items like trash bags, filler or padding, as is often the case with recycled plastics.
If successful, the hybrid recycling project would dramatically improve on a historical recycling rate of below 10% industry-wide, said the projects lead researcher Jo瓊o Maia, a professor in macromolecular science and engineering.
That low recycling rate has become more widely known recently with that recycling plastics was too difficult and too expensive to be sustainable.
So this would be a game-changer in the plastics industry and for the environment, Maia said. Nothing comes close to plastic for its usefulness, its strength. Its basically impossible to replace plastics, so the world had to figure out a way to do betterand we decided to be the ones to do it.
Other partners include several 窪蹋勛圖厙 researchers; the Brazilian petrochemical company ; Cincinnati-based company ; Resource Material and Recycling of Middlefield, Ohio; and a pair of federal partners, the and , a government lab operated under contract with division of Honeywell International Inc.
"We are excited to bring this project to Northeast Ohio, sitting at the heart of the nation's plastics manufacturing industry, said Grant Goodrich, executive director of the Great Lakes Energy Institute at 窪蹋勛圖厙, which helped facilitate the research.
Goodrich said the project could create novel solutions for two issues: addressing the difficult process of removing contaminants (scraps of food, labels, etc.) from sorted plastic waste, and recycling those plastics that have so far been impossible to recycle.
Maia said the initial research would be done at 窪蹋勛圖厙 and then tested at a larger scale off site.
Two innovations in one project
Most common plastics are recycled in two ways: using mechanical or chemical means to break down the material. (This does not include thermoset plastics, the harder plastics which have generally been considered virtually impossible to recycle, although , too).
For now, mechanical recyclingplacing plastic waste into a machine, melting it into an extruder, adding a pigment and producing large volumes of lower-quality plastichas limitationsand few quality results: Black trash bagsthats about the best you can do, Maia said.
Alternatively, plastics can be broken down chemically at high temperature (about 500 degrees Celsius) and high pressure and re-used for many things. You can change the polymers to give you something you want, but the problem is that it is energy- and solvent-intensive, and you cant solve the problem at the societal scale of millions of tons per year that is required Maia said.
For example, Maia said, a new polyolefin .
Thats a drop in the ocean and at incredible costtoo much for most small cities to do on their own, he said. To be successful, plastic needs to be recycled on site, at large scale and at much lower cost.
The 窪蹋勛圖厙-led team plans to develop a hybrid model, taking the low-cost investment of mechanical recycling, but breaking down the plastics through a new lower-temperature (about 350 Celsius), lower-pressure method.
The team also will study how to separate various polymers in the melt state, so that each can then by upcycled by itself. One of the partners in this work, Braskem, was able to separate about 20% of the polystyrene from the plastic in trial runs.
But they did that without optimizing the process, Maia said. We believe we can do that even better and achieve 80%. That would really move things forward, and it could be scalable, so handled by individual communities with an investment of maybe only $3-4 million.
The project was among a dozen DOE-awarded grants totaling $27 million, a list that also includes a $2 million award to the University of Akron, giving Northeast Ohio nearly 17% of the total program funding.
For more information, contact Mike Scott at mike.scott@case.edu.
This article was originally published Nov. 9, 2020.
