Assistant professor Ina Vollmer has recently received an ERC Starting Grant of 1.6 million euros, the Incubator grant from Circular Plastics NL for 660k euros and a NWO Demonstrator grant of 160k euros for her plastic recycling research.
The main goal of the five-year ERC project IMPACT is to gain fundamental insight into the innovative process of breaking down plastics to its chemical building blocks, the monomers, by using force. Using this mechano-chemical approach, instead of heat, is potentially more sustainable and yields higher quality building blocks for new plastic products. Fundamental knowledge is needed to optimize and upscale these kinds of recycling methods.
With the Incubator grant from Circular Plastics NL, a consortium around Vollmer will exploit the forces that occur during polymer extrusion instead of ball milling and combine it with catalysis for chemical recycling of polyolefins. The project team includes Coperion, CARBOLIQ, Philip Biessey from the group Ruhr University Bochum Rudinei Fiorio and Kim Ragaert from Maastricht University.
A kg-scale reactor will be built in the NWO Demonstrator project to demonstrate the upscaling potential of the ball mill-based conversion to get one step closer to potentially commercializing the two patents that Vollmer and her team applied for on this technology.