Towards Viable Interdisciplinary Solutions for Plastics Recycling and Redesign

Plastics are incredibly versatile materials that have become ubiquitous throughout the modern world and are made today overwhelmingly from fossil fuel derived intermediates. Today, the persistence of plastics in landfills and the natural environment is broadly recognized as an immediate and growing global pollution crisis that the current recycling infrastructure is unable to address. Going forward, new solutions that employ innovative recycling strategies to enable circularity for today’s plastics, alongside the transition to recyclable-by-design plastics of tomorrow, are desperately needed.

Accordingly, the goal of this GRC is to assemble an interdisciplinary and international community of researchers to foster new collaborations and to accelerate the science and engineering of plastics recycling, upcycling, and redesign. This meeting will cover topics including understanding the scope of the plastics problem and the issues from a carbon, energy, economic, and pollution perspective, the use of new approaches to recycle and upcycle today’s plastics, and the use of new building blocks to produce plastics that are recyclable-by-design. Interaction, discussion, and teamwork between biologists, chemists, engineers, environmental scientists, material scientists, sustainability analysts, and others will be critical to generate new solutions, realize evidence-based policy, and ultimately stem the flow of plastics into the natural environment and the world’s landfills, toward the common goal of establishing a more sustainable future for the planet.