The Digest’s 2024 Multi-Slide Guide to plastics upcycling projects by industry

The Bio-Optimized Technologies to keep Thermoplastics out of Landfills and the Environment (BOTTLE) consortium is developing new chemical upcycling strategies for today’s plastics and redesigning tomorrow’s plastics to be recyclable-by-design. BOTTLE conducts high-impact research and development to deliver scalable technologies that enable cost-effective recycling, upcycling, and increased energy efficiency for plastics.

Under the BOTTLE research framework, the consortium is working to deconstruct waste plastics with catalysis and use chemical and biological transformations to upcycle the resulting intermediates to produce recyclable by design polymers. Here, our presenters focused on BOTTLE industry engagements, solving real-world problems in plastics upcycling via targeted, company-funded projects at companies such as Amazon, Patagonia and Kraft. Katrina Knauer, BOTTLE CTO, National Renewable Energy Laboratory gave this presentation on the project at DOE Project Peer Review.