Plastic deconstructed: Amazon supports US Department of Energy’s advanced recycling consortium

10 Mar 2022 --- Amazon is joining the US Department of Energy’s advanced recycling consortium BOTTLE (Bio-Optimized Technologies to keep Thermoplastics out of Landfills and the Environment), which is developing new chemical upcycling strategies to prevent packaging pollution and create valuable new resources for industry.

PackagingInsights speaks to Alan Jacobsen, a principal materials scientist at Amazon, about the corporation’s involvement in the consortium and what it could mean for the future of packaging technology and waste management. 

He explains that the most commonly used plastics are polyolefins, including polyethylene and polypropylene, and the most common application for these materials is packaging. The strong carbon-carbon bonds in polyolefins are difficult to break down, he says, so in cases where mechanical recycling is not cost-effective – or even possible due to contamination – energy-intensive chemical recycling processes (pyrolysis or gasification) would be required to recover and reuse the carbon. 

Likewise, conventional polyolefins with a carbon-carbon molecular backbone do not break down easily in natural environments.

“In partnership with BOTTLE, we plan to make significant progress in developing new technologies and materials that will lead to less material in landfills and more back into the circular economy,” asserts Jacobsen. 

Deconstructable waste
The goal of Amazon’s work with the BOTTLE Consortium is to develop new technologies that will enable and encourage the maintenance of carbon in plastics by ensuring it is both technically and economically viable to recover and recycle these materials at the end of their life, explains Jacobsen. 

Amazon is working with the US government to develop new advanced recycling technoloy.“One objective is to ultimately develop an energy-efficient chemical processing technology that can break down or deconstruct a mixed waste stream of plastics with labile bonds (bonds that are easy to deconstruct) into valuable feedstock that can be used to make the same types of plastics (closed-loop recycling) or new plastics altogether (open-loop recycling),” he says. 

In cases where these materials don’t make it into a future recycling stream, the molecular structure can be designed to biodegrade in natural environments. 

While Amazon cannot give a timeline on the development of the technology at this point, it says it plans to include as many stakeholders as possible to maximize the impact against plastic pollution globally. 

Handling mixed waste 
Amazon will be eliminating the need for excessive sortation of the materials before deconstruction by developing a new deconstruction technology that can handle mixed waste streams of plastics, says Jacobsen. 

“This [elimination] will also help accelerate the scaling of the technology because of greater available-material volumes, and the technology itself will not be dependent on the commercial success of a single type of material.”

“Our plan is to synthesize new materials from the deconstructed plastics and process them into films to understand their structure-property relationships and then develop a path toward recyclable-by-design replacements for packaging applications, while also ensuring these materials could be composted in an industrial facility or safely degrade in natural environments,” he continues. 

“We envision this new flexible deconstruction process as a flywheel, where the materials that require the least amount of time and energy to break down and recover will lead to lower-cost feedstock for new-materials production, leading to lower-cost materials.”

The lower costs of these materials are intended to further incentivize their use over traditional virgin plastics. In addition, Jacobsen says he anticipates the materials that more easily break down in this new process will also have the added benefit of being more likely to be compostable or to degrade in natural environments easily.Amazon says scientific advances could make plastic waste an increasingly valuable resource.

US environment efforts 
US Department of Energy, the BOTTLE Consortium is led by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). Gregg Beckham, BOTTLE’s CEO and a senior research fellow at the NREL, says: “Plastics are extremely versatile materials, and often they are still the best option available for a myriad of functions.” 

“Finding a way to recycle single-use plastics better while reducing and ultimately eliminating their use is a grand challenge of our time, and we’re committed to pursuing scientific advancement to this end. With Amazon’s innovation expertise, we’re excited to work together to find solutions that have the potential to have vast, positive impacts.”

The US Department of Defense also recently began efforts to reduce material waste by partnering with US-based biotech company Conagen to use its proprietary fermentation technology to convert plastic waste into reusable materials on the battlefield. 

By Louis Gore-Langton