At Pyran, Kevin Barnett is out to replace petroleum with plants
The Capital Times by Natalie Yahr – Kevin Barnett was in his fourth year of chemical engineering grad school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison when it hit him. He was sitting in a room of around 80 engineering grad students at the Wisconsin Entrepreneurial Bootcamp, and the instructor had just asked the group to raise their hands if they’d ever started a company.
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Chemists are reimagining recycling to keep plastics out of landfills
SCIENCENEWS by Maria Temming — It feels good to recycle. There’s a certain sense of accomplishment that comes from dutifully sorting soda bottles, plastic bags and yogurt cups from the rest of the garbage. The more plastic you put in that blue bin, the more your keeping out of landfills and the oceans, right?
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New solvent-based recycling process could cut down on millions of tons of plastic waste
MADISON, Wis. — Multilayer plastic materials are ubiquitous in food and medical supply packaging, particularly since layering polymers can give those films specific properties, like heat resistance or oxygen and moisture control. But despite their utility, those ever-present plastics are impossible to recycle using conventional methods.
About 100 million tons of multilayer thermoplastics — each composed of as many as 12 layers of varying polymers — are produced globally every year. Forty percent of that total is waste from the manufacturing process itself, and because there has been no way to separate the polymers, almost all of that plastic ends up in landfills or incinerators.
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No More Landfill! Complex Plastic Recycling in Post-Industrial Waste
Cheaper, more sustainable way to produce plastic precursors
Scientists and engineers at UW-Madison developed an economically feasible process to synthesize a possible substitute for petroleum-derived chemicals from non-edible biomass.
This substitute, called 1,5-pentanediol, is a type of alpha, omega-diol that has two alcohol groups attached at the beginning and the end of a long carbon chain, which is mostly synthesized as a byproduct of other commercially produced diols.
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Revolutionizing recycling: UW-Madison research team works to find better way to reuse plastics
MADISON, Wis. – Kevin Sanchez-Rivera spends many hours in the first-floor labs of the engineering building on campus, just a block or so away from Camp Randall. The graduate student feels like the scientific community has a responsibility to figure out a way to make sure plastics are used more than once.
His supervisor, George Huber, is leading the research that he says could change the way we recycle one of the most wasteful products on Earth.
Huber and his team are looking at ways to negate that contamination by separating all of the plastics that are mixed together to make every day items. That’s where Reid Vanlehn comes in. Vanlehn is a chemical and biological engineer who concocts solvents to separate different plastic components from the same material. He uses computer simulations to see how molecules would react and whether certain solutions might be successful in the lab.
The full article can be found here.