Braskem, Princeton and University of Illinois to share grant

A $2 million grant from the Department of Energy (DOE) will be shared among Braskem America, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Princeton University to develop plastic that is perpetually recyclable or can safely degrade in the environment to curb the waste and pollution caused by single-use plastics. 

The grant, which will be given over a three-year period, is part of $13.4 million in DOE funding to spur development of next-generation plastic technologies.  

The team will focus on redesigning PE packaging material. PE is used to create the majority of single-use plastic objects, in part because of its low cost and mechanical strength. Its downsides include poor oxygen barrier properties, which lead to the use of barrier layers in PE packaging, which can make the packaging unrecyclable. The team will use Braskem’s bio-PE resin in its trials.

“We’ll engineer the molecular structure to create a single-material plastic to achieve what can only be achieved today by multiple materials,” said Richard Register, an expert in polymer structure-property relationships at Princeton. “The benefits are two-fold: reducing manufacturing complexity and enabling mechanical recycling of materials that today accumulate in landfills.”