Project Description

More than five billion tons of polyolefin waste has accumulated worldwide over the past 50 years. The majority of the world’s plastic waste goes directly into landfills, 3% ends up in the oceans, and only 9% is recycled. At the current rate, the planet will have 30 billion tons of plastic waste and more plastics than fish in the oceans by 2050. Plastics degrade slowly (>100 years), releasing microplastics, nanoparticles, and toxic chemicals into the landfills, ground water, rivers, and oceans. This pollution poses serious threats to our ecosystems, drinking water, food supply, and human health.
To reduce the fast accumulating plastic waste and more than $200 billion presently lost annually as polyolefin waste, we are developing efficient and economical methods for converting polyolefin waste into pristine polymers or clean fuels. The specific goals are to (1) develop extraction and chromatography methods to selectively separate polymers from dyes and other additives, (2) develop hydrothermal liquefaction methods for converting mixed polyolefin waste into clean fuels; and (3) evaluate the environmental impact/benefits and optimize processing energy and costs through LCA and techno-economic analysis.

Start Date

Spring or Fall 2020

Postdoc Qualifications 

Desired but not required research experience in sustainability, reaction engineering, separations, extraction, chromatography, polymer chemistry, analytical methods, fuel properties.

Co-advising 

Professor N.-H. Linda Wang
wangn@purdue.edu
Chemical Engineering

Professor Gozdem Kilaz
gkilaz@purdue.edu
School of Engineering Technology

References 

Chen, W. T., K. Jin, N.-H. L. Wang, “Use of Super Critical Water for the Liquefaction of Polypropylene into Oil,” ACS Sustainable Chemistry and Engineering, 2019. 

Chen, W.-T., K. Jin, and N.-H. L. Wang, “Conversion of Plastic Waste into Useful Stock,” Patent Application, US 16/389,855, April 18, 2019. 

Weeden, G. S. Jr., N. H. Soepriatna, and N.-H. L. Wang, “Method for Efficient Recovery of High-Purity Polycarbonates from Electronic Waste,” Environ. Sci. and Tech, 49, 2425-2433 (2015). 

Weeden, G. S. Jr., L. Ling, N. H. Soepriatna, and N.-H. L. Wang, “Size-Exclusion Simulated Moving Bed for Recovering High-Purity Phosphorous Flame Retardants with High Yield from Mixtures Containing Polymers,” J. of Chromatogr. A, 1422, 99-116 (2015). 

Weeden, G. S. Jr. and N.-H. L. Wang, “Speedy Standing Wave Design of Size-Exclusion SMB: Solvent Consumption and Sorbent Productivity Related to Material Properties and Design Parameters,” J. of Chromatogr. A, 1418, 54-76 (2015)