George Huber UW Madison Chemical Engineering and Director of CUWP (www.cuwp.org) will be our GUEST Speaker on April 12, 2023, introducing STRAP to the Flexible Packaging, Plastics, Printing and Converting Industries. One of the largest sectors for plastic waste is the packaging industry which accounted for more than 35% of the plastics produced. These plastic packaging materials come in the form of multilayer films, which are composites of distinct polymers that are combined to achieve specific properties that cannot be provided by single plastic layers and impossible to recycle through mechanical recycling ending up in landfills!
To register, go to: www.greenbayinnovationgroup.com EVENTS. The cost is $40.00 including a tour of Convergen Energy, lunch at Johnsonville Tailgate Village followed by 4 guest speakers!
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 complete at the end of 2023. We are working with several Wisconsin plastic converters (Amcor, CNG, ePac, Placon and others) to convert their plastic wastes into high quality resins. The pilot system will provide enough material to plastic converters to qualify them in several applications. After we successfully operate the pilot system we hope to design the first commercial facility in Green Bay, WI. This facility will produce high-quality PE and PP resins from plastic wastes and sell them back to plastic converters.
Bio of George Willis Huber
George Willis Huber is the Richard Antoine Professor of Chemical Engineering at the 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 the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2005). He obtained his B.S. (1999) and M.S.(2000) degrees in Chemical Engineering from Brigham Young University.
