This multidisciplinary team will tackle the problem of accumulating plastics waste in landfills and the environment – a rapidly emerging national and global issue - by developing new approaches to convert plastics into valuable chemicals and related consumer strategies. This project will investigate and develop a process that breaks down polymers by application of mechanical forces (e.g., in a ball mill) in the solid phase with zero/minimal solvent use. Energy-efficient recovery and purification of the chemical products will be achieved using nanoporous materials that separate molecules based upon size, shape, or specific interactions. Process systems modeling will identify the key requirements for integrating these technological units into viable industrial processes. At the same time, consumer behavior studies will reveal means of motivating consumers to provide suitable plastics streams and increase public acceptance of the proposed products. Thus, technological innovations and behavioral/logistical insights will be integrated into process and supply chain-level models that guide long-term economic decision-making. This framework has great potential to be a transformative paradigm change in how plastics recycling systems are envisaged and designed. The project features a number of educational and outreach activities, including the infusion of circular economy concepts into the Georgia Tech curriculum through collaborative teaching module development as well as wider dissemination of these concepts through an online Lecture Archive for Sustainable Chemical Processes accessible to worldwide users.
This EFRI project will create an integrated process strategy for converting plastic waste into its monomers or other valuable molecular products, through a combination of mechanocatalytic depolymerization and energy-efficient separations guided by process systems modeling and analysis of supply chains and consumer behavior. This framework is central to the concept of future refineries that will convert waste feedstocks mechanocatalytically (e.g., in ball mills), to generate tunable crude product streams containing monomers for production of fresh plastics and/or oligomeric intermediates for upcycling to more valuable products. Mechanocatalytic reactions use mechanical impact energy (rather than heat) to drive chemical reactions and provide intimate contact between solid catalysts and feedstocks allowing for solvent-free reactions. Depolymerization products will be solubilized, fractionated, and purified with new, energy-efficient membranes and adsorbers, which are key for achieving large reductions in overall process costs. Consumer behavior studies will reveal means of motivating consumers to provide suitable plastics streams and increase public acceptance of the proposed products. We will integrate our technological innovations and behavioral/logistical insights together into process and supply chain-level models that guide long-term economic decision-making. The team will integrate these efforts by targeting key dimensions of the plastics recycling puzzle, and convergently integrate our new knowledge to forge an economically viable and sustainable process and to educate a new generation of professionals with a multidisciplinary background.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
