CSP Investigator Chris Ellison and colleagues Ellison group created polymers to make recycling processes more efficient.
Mixed plastics pose a challenge for the recycling industry since they have to be sorted before they can be primed for reuse. The United States produced an average of 35.7 million tons of plastic in 2018. According to the Environmental Protection Association, only about 9 percent of those plastics were actually recycled.
CSP researchers have invented a way to address this problem—a polymer technology that enables polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and polyethylene (PE)—to be recycled together without sorting. The technology was also recently licensed by a local company, and we are excited about the potential commercial applications of this discovery!
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