A small proportion of plastics are sent to be recycled “mechanically,” meaning they are melted down and then re-shaped into new products. To date, more than 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic material have been produced, and the vast majority of this has ended up in landfills or waste incineration plants. “The next phase of our collaboration is to answer these questions.” Checking the boxes of cheap and easy
“The questions are how much it will cost, what the impact on energy use and emissions will be, and how to get there from where we are today,” added Helms, a staff scientist at Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry. “We started talking to industry about deploying 100% infinitely recycled plastics and have received a lot of interest.” Everyone is trying to recycle whatever they’re putting out in the market,” said Vora. “These days, there is a huge push for adopting circular economy practices in the industry. The authors calculated the chemical inputs and technology needed, as well as the costs and greenhouse gas emissions, then compared their findings to the equivalent figures for production of conventional plastics. The study presents a simulation for a 20,000-metric-ton-per-year facility that puts out new PDKs and takes in used PDK waste for recycling. PDKs were designed to be recycled from the get-go, and since the beginning, the team has been working to refine the production and recycling processes for PDK so that the material could be inexpensive and easy enough to be deployed at commercial scales in anything from packaging to cars.”
“But driving sustainability is the heart of this project. The need to do so was recognized long afterward,” explained Nemi Vora, first author on the report and a former postdoctoral fellow who worked with senior author Corinne Scown. “Plastics were never designed to be recycled. The bottom line? PDK-based plastic could quickly become commercially competitive with conventional plastics, and the products will get less expensive and more sustainable as time goes on. Now, the team has released a study that shows what can be accomplished if manufacturers began using PDKs on a large scale. Called poly(diketoenamine), or PDK, the material has all the convenient properties of traditional plastics while avoiding the environmental pitfalls, because unlike traditional plastics, PDKs can be recycled indefinitely with no loss in quality. Less than two years ago, Helms announced the invention of a new plastic that could tackle the waste crisis head on. A team led by Corinne Scown, Brett Helms, Jay Keasling, and Kristin Persson at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) set out to change that. generates about 100 kg of plastic waste per year, most of which goes straight to a landfill.
Eleven members of the entering class have both parents who are alumni of the Naval Ac ademy. The Class of 2025 includes 55 sons and 22 daughters of Naval Academy alumni. The Class of 2025 also includes 16 international students from Egypt (1), Fiji (1), Ghana (1), Indonesia (2), Jordan (1), Maldives (1), Malaysia (1), Peru (1), Philippines (2), Sri Lanka (1), Taiwan (1), Thailand (1), and Tunisia (2). Midshipmen were admitted from every state in the Nation, as well as the District of Columbia, American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, and Puerto Rico. The Class of 2025 includes 348 women (29%) and a total of 485 minority midshipmen (41 % ).