E3P: Decision sequencing to end end-of-life plastics
Significance
Eliminating end-of-life plastics requires technological advances to maximize recycling and recovery, understanding and developing techniques to influence consumer behavior, and economic approaches to incentivize extension of product life. Each alternative involves trade-offs in its social acceptability, economic feasibility, environmental sustainability, and circularity. The overall goal of this multidisciplinary project is to develop holistic and systematic methods and tools for assessment, design, and innovation toward Sustainable and Circular E3P (SCE3P).
Project goals
The project team is conducting synergistic research in polymer chemistry, reaction engineering, and molecular simulation to determine properties of depolymerization and valorization processes under conditions of contamination; process design to model the cost and physical flows of current and emerging technologies; supply network modeling to determine the effects on the wider chemical industry; behavioral studies to discern the role of consumers; life cycle and circularity assessment to estimate environmental effects across global value chains. The resulting framework will consider the entire plastics life cycle, including thousands of alternatives at each step to select the “best” pathway.
In this larger project, our lab is specifically focusing on enhancing understanding about sequences in which consumers make common, related consumption choices throughout the lifecycles of products and their packaging. Specifically, we aim to better understand:
1) The sequences in which consumers make choices about products (e.g., coffee), packaging (e.g., cup), and packaging disposal
2) How earlier decisions in a sequence influence later decisions
