NREL Pion­eers Clean­er Route to Upcycle Plastics into Super­i­or Products

Pub­lished in Joule, ​“Com­bin­ing reclaimed PET with bio-based monomers enables plastics upcyc­ling,” describes how the NREL team chem­ic­ally com­bined reclaimed poly­ethyl­ene tere­ph­thal­ate (PET) plastic, in the form of single-use bever­age bottles, with bio-based com­pounds to pro­duce high­er-value fiber-rein­forced plastics (FRPs) that can be used in products from snow­boards to vehicle parts to wind tur­bines. Not only are the res­ult­ing com­pos­ites worth more than double the ori­gin­al PET, the FRPs exhib­it twice the strength and improved adhe­sion to fiber­glass when com­pared to the stand­ard pet­ro­leum-derived FRP. ​“Most recyc­ling today is down­cyc­ling — there’s very little fin­an­cial motiv­a­tion,” said NREL Seni­or Research Fel­low Gregg Beck­ham, one of the primary authors of the paper. ​“Know­ing that 26 mil­lion tons of PET are pro­duced each year but only 30% of PET bottles are recycled in the United States, our find­ings rep­res­ent a sig­ni­fic­ant advance­ment in enabling the cir­cu­lar mater­i­als eco­nomy.” The NREL team also included staff poly­mer research­er Nic Ror­rer, who has pre­vi­ously worked with bio-based mucon­ic acid and break­ing down reclaimed PET. ​“We are excited to have developed a tech­no­logy that incentiv­izes the eco­nom­ics of plastics reclam­a­tion,” Ror­rer said. ​“The ulti­mate goal is to reduce the amount of waste plastics in land­fills and oceans.” In addi­tion, this pro­cess is more energy effi­cient and less haz­ard­ous than stand­ard man­u­fac­tur­ing pro­cesses for pet­ro­leum-based FRPs. NREL per­formed a sup­ply-chain ana­lys­is of the FRP mater­i­als and found sub­stan­tial energy sav­ings and green­house gas emis­sion reduc­tions when com­pared to the pro­cess for pro­du­cing pet­ro­leum-based com­pos­ites. This research rep­res­ents a poten­tial step for­ward in sus­tain­able meth­ods to upcycle plastics into long-last­ing, high-per­form­ance mater­i­als that could boost recyc­ling efforts through­out the world. The work repor­ted in Joule was enabled by fund­ing from NREL’s Labor­at­ory Dir­ec­ted Research and Devel­op­ment pro­gram, with addi­tion­al fund­ing from the U.S. Depart­ment of Energy’s (DOE’s) Bioen­ergy Tech­no­lo­gies Office. NREL is the U.S. Depart­ment of Energy’s primary nation­al labor­at­ory for renew­able energy and energy effi­ciency research and devel­op­ment. NREL is oper­ated for the Energy Depart­ment by The Alli­ance for Sus­tain­able Energy, LLC. Source: NREL, News release, 27.02.2019