Plastic Waste Conversion

More than 350 million tons of plastic was produced in 2015, and the total amount of plastic waste in the landfills and oceans continues to rise over the past 50 years. The majority (90%) of the world’s plastic waste goes directly into landfills and 3% ends up in the oceans.

Most plastics take hundreds of years to degrade, and as they slowly degrade, they release toxic chemicals into the environment. This pollution poses serious threats to our ecosystems, drinking water, and food supply. If the current trend continues, our oceans will have 250 million tons of plastics by 2025, or “one pound of plastics for every three pounds of fish”. Restoration of our environment and the ecosystems will be increasingly challenging and costly.

Our proposed solution to resolve this challenge is to develop an integrated solution using a combination of mixed-solvent extraction, advanced chromatography separation, and hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL) technologies to convert mixed plastics waste into high-purity polymers, valuable chemicals (e.g., dyes, flame retardants), and clean fuels. The Chen Group is working on the following aims:

1. Develop a process combining dissolution/reprecipitation and advanced chromatography to recover and separate high-purity polymers from plastic additives
2. Optimize hydrothermal liquefaction of crystalline polymers such as polypropylene (PP) and polyethylene (PE) into clean fuels
3. Evaluate the environmental impact and optimize energy and costs through process design, lifecycle analysis, and technoeconomic analysis