ONLINE: Wednesday Nite at the Lab
press release: The registration link will be the same through the end of May 2021. Presentations and Q&A will be posted later on the WN@TL YouTube site.
On July 7 Reid Van Lehn of the Department of Chemical & Biological Engineering will speak on "New Recycling Technologies to Combat Plastic Pollution."
Description: Plastics are ubiquitous in all facets of everyday life. Globally, over 400 million metric tons of plastic are produced per year; over 35 million tons of plastic are consumed in the United States alone. These numbers are projected to increase, contributing to numerous long-term environmental challenges. Of particular note is the growing accumulation of discarded plastic waste in landfills and the environment. Despite public support for plastic recycling, the plastics industry has struggled to make recycling commercially competitive. As a result, only 2% of waste plastics is converted back to their original starting material via closed-loop recycling, while over 70% is diverted to landfills or leaks into the environment. There is thus an urgent need for new, economically viable technologies to recycle – or upcycle – plastic waste.
In this presentation, I will introduce the Center for the Chemical Upcycling of Waste Plastics (CUWP), which was recently established at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with funding from the Department of Energy. CUWP is developing new technologies designed for the near-term recycling of waste plastics. We are working in close collaboration with a range of scientists and engineers across 7 different universities in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, as well as 8 companies that produce, recycle, or consume plastics. I will particularly focus on a technology that we call Solvent-Targeted Recovery and Precipitation (STRAP), which was recently developed as a method to recycle plastic packaging materials. STRAP has been shown to recover nearly 100% of the components from a high-volume commercial plastic film provided by our industrial partners and is less expensive than purchasing the original plastic material. I will conclude my talk by highlighting several other promising plastic recycling technologies being developed in academic and industrial laboratories around the world.
Bio: Reid Van Lehn is the Conway Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from MIT under the supervision of Prof. Alfredo Alexander-Katz, then performed research as a NIH Ruth-Kirschstein postdoctoral fellow with Prof. Tom F. Miller III at Caltech. He joined the University of Wisconsin-Madison in May 2016, where his group develops and applies molecular simulation methods to characterize, predict, and engineer the physicochemical properties of soft materials. He was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 in Science list in 2016 and has recently been recognized with the 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award, the UW-Madison Vilas Associate award, and an NSF CAREER award.
Links: https://www.facebook.com/
https://vanlehngroup.che.wisc.
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