EEE and ME Professor Rebecca Ciez received a 2023 Scialog Collaborative Innovation Award for her unconventional research in decarbonization. Ciez personally received $50,000 from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to aid her team’s project: “Plastic Waste to DAC: A Study of the Chemical and Lifecycle Feasibility of Converting Polyolefin Waste to Aminopolymers for Direct Air Capture.”

“The Scialog Program often supports projects that do not fit into typical categories. These projects involve bigger, riskier ideas with transformative potential,” Ciez explains.

Ciez’s project, co-investigated by Michael McGuirk, a Chemistry professor from Colorado School of Mines, focuses on the feasibility of converting waste plastics into aminopolymers used in direct air capture (DAC). DAC is a decarbonization method that involves filtering CO2 from the air. Since CO2 is naturally very stable, it can be difficult to find materials suitable for this process. Researchers have been using aminopolymers effectively for years, however, to be globally scalable, it would require the substance in enormous quantities. Current processes to create aminopolymers are high-cost, high-energy, and high-risk. That is where waste plastics come in.

“We are attempting to take one major environmental challenge, waste plastics, and feed that into another challenge, CO2 emissions. If it proves effective, it would be using one issue as a solution to another,” Ciez says.

Furthering decarbonization, sustainability, and improving environmental systems are a few of the overarching goals of EEE. Ciez’s work on global scale decarbonization challenges focuses on comprehensive analysis of the system’s life-cycle, performance, and energy consumption.

“If we're going to meet the mid-century climate targets, we need new, innovative, and sustainable decarbonization technologies like these.” – Rebecca Ciez EEE/ME

See the rest of the nominees and the official announcement here.

About the Scialog: Negative Emissions Science program.

The Research Corporation for Science Advancement, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and ClimateWorks Foundation has been funding early career scientists and their projects for four years through the Scialog: Negative Emissions Science program. This initiative aims to advance the underlying science needed to make technologies that capture and utilize greenhouse gases on a global scale.