Over the next five years, Bert Weckhuysen will be working together with industry partners to investigate how colorants from plastic bottles can be recycled.
To make the plastic industry circular, we need innovative recycling technologies that yield a higher quality product. An interdisciplinary consortium of academic and industrial partners recently received funding to help achieve this.
Arjan Smit has been working at TNO for fifteen years, and in 2019, he initiated a collaboration with Utrecht University professor Pieter Bruijnincx to pursue a PhD and advance his work further. Their joint research now plays a crucial role in the feasibility of an advanced biorefinery at a demo scale.
Assistant professor Ina Vollmer received an ERC Starting Grant for her plastic recycling research. The main goal of the five-year project is to gain fundamental insight into the innovative process of breaking down plastics to its chemical building blocks, the monomers, by using force.
