The Center for Chemical Upcycling of Waste Plastics (www.cuwp.org) is developing a technology that allows the recycling of flexible and rigid, multilayer and mixed plastic wastes. This technology is called solvent targeted recovery and precipitation, or STRAP.
STRAP uses non-toxic solvents to produce food grade resins from previously unrecyclable materials. STRAP has been demonstrated in the laboratory and is now being scaled up. A larger 25 kg/hr pilot system is being built at Michigan Tech University and will be completed at the end of 2023.
CUWP is working with several plastic converters (Amcor, CNG, ePak, Placon) to convert their plastic wastes into high quality resins. The pilot system will provide enough material to plastic convertors to qualify them in several applications. After CUWP successfully operates the pilot system, the organization hopes to design the first commercial facility in Green Bay. This facility will produce high quality PE and PP resins from plastic wastes and sell them back to plastic convertors.
Bio of George Willis Huber
George Willis Huber is the Richard Antoine Professor of Chemical Engineering at University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focus is the design of disruptive technologies for the recycling of waste plastics and working to bring these technologies to market. He is the director of the $12.5 million Center on Chemical Upcycling of Waste Plastics (CUWP).
He is co-founder of two companies that are commercializing technology he developed: Anellotech (www.anellotech.com) and Pyran (www.pyranco.com). He has been named a “highly-cited researcher” in the area of chemistry, an award given to the top 1% most cited chemists. He has published over 230 papers, more than 20 patent applications, and received over 40,000 citations,.
Professor Huber has received visiting professorships from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2015 (at Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics), from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019-20 and the ExxonMobil Visiting Chair Professor at National University of Singapore in 2019. He obtained his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from University of Wisconsin-Madison (2005). He obtained his B.S. (1999) and M.S. (2000) degrees in Chemical Engineering from Brigham Young University.
