More than eight billion tons of plastic waste has accumulated worldwide over the past 50 years. The majority (80%) of the waste goes directly into landfills and 3% ends up in the oceans. At the current rate, we will end up having more plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050. Plastics are persistent in the environment and degrade slowly (over a century), releasing fragments, microplastics, and toxic chemicals into our lands, rivers, and oceans. In particular, single-use packaging, textile, and composite plastic such as e-waste are attributed to more than 50% of the plastic waste.

This webinar will discuss:
1) The bottleneck of conventional plastic recycling;
2) State-of-the-art emerging chemical recycling methods (e.g., pyrolysis, chemolysis, and hydrothermal processes)
3) Case studies about using chemical recycling to reuse the end-of-life waste.

Ultimately, the Plastic & Environment Research Laboratory (PERL) at University of Massachusetts Lowell (UMass Lowell) aims to develop affordable and competitive plastic recycling technologies to encourage the use of environment-friendly products and educate younger generations on sustainable technology.

Prof. Grace Chen directs PERL at UMass Lowell. Prof. Chen’s current research focuses on four topics: 1) Chemical recycling of plastic waste into fuels, polymers, and chemicals, 2) Biofuel and bioplastic material development, 3) Microplastic pollution mitigation, and 4) Green solvent formulation. Her lab is equipped with reactors for hydrothermal processing of plastic waste and biowaste, as well as characterizations for fuel/polymer products. Also, her lab has a license to a specialized software, Hansen Solubility Parameters in Practice (HSPiP), to study plastic dissolution, coating removal, and packaging failure mechanisms. The Chen Group’s research program contributes to the development of new multi-disciplinary materials on the topic of plastic waste recycling, biomaterial synthesis, and sustainability analysis.