Paschalis Alexandridis, University at Buffalo
Unlocking Value from Plastics with Advanced Sorting and Molecular Recycling
Plastics are widely used across industries such as food, beverage, textile, healthcare, automotive, aerospace, construction, agriculture, and petroleum. The annual production of plastics currently stands at half a trillion pounds. However, following their use, the great majority of plastics are landfilled or released into the environment, and only a small fraction of plastics is being recycled, about 5% in the US. Ample room exists for improving the current situation, so that we continue to benefit from the useful properties of plastics but reduce their undesirable impacts.
The presentation will start with an overview of plastic waste management, point to current concerns of plastics contributing to greenhouse gas emissions and littering the land and the oceans, and update on policies aimed to tackle plastic pollution. Recent research advances will be highlighted in the automated identification of plastic type for mechanical recycling, where spectroscopy data are analyzed with machine learning, and in solvent-based molecular recycling of plastics, whereby polymers are selectively dissolved and precipitated to achieve separation and recovery. Because the polymer chains do not break, this presents a promising, low-greenhouse gas and low-energy methodology for recycling plastics that cannot be mechanically recycled, including multilayer films, blends and composites.
Bio
Paschalis Alexandridis is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York (SUNY), where he has served as Director of the Materials Science and Engineering program and Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Education in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He received his PhD in chemical engineering from MIT and has carried out postdoctoral research in polymer physical chemistry at Lund University. Alexandridis is an expert on complex fluids and soft matter, whose research bridges molecular organization to mesoscale structure, and translates these into processes and products that are environmentally responsible and energy-efficient. Ongoing projects address self-assembly of block copolymers and PFAS sequestration. In the field of plastics recycling, Alexandridis is leading projects in advanced sorting, chemical recycling, and recycling of multilayer films. Alexandridis has 200 journal publications and 6 US patents (Google Scholar h-index 83 and 25,500 citations). He is a Fellow of AAAS, AIChE, RSC, and IAAM, and held leadership positions within AIChE Area 1C: "Interfacial Phenomena" and the ACS Division of Colloid and Surface Chemistry. Alexandridis is currently serving as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Dispersion Science and Technology, and Review Editor for the Journal of Surfactants and Detergents. (http://www.cbe.buffalo.edu/alexandridis)