Current Project: Learning Sustainability through Plastic Recycling, Repurposing, and Promoting a Circular Economy for Plastics for a Sustainable Future
The overall purpose of our project is to serve as a catalyst to create an effective continuous, sustainable, and circular recycling process. We are also interested in incorporating sustainability to the chemical engineering degree program and in creating a framework to facilitate the integration of sustainability to courses in other disciplines. By these efforts, we hope to help train the sustainability leaders of the future.
- Experimentally, our project will create fully recycled plastic products designed to combat the solid waste generated by UT laboratories. Our objective is to fabricate products of substantial value, both environmentally and financially, which can then potentially lead the way for economies of scale and enduring value creation.
- Educationally, we are advancing sustainability education, and fostering a heightened sustainability awareness throughout our campus through a collaborative partnership with EH&S.
Sustainability Education
We are also interested in the integration of sustainability education to the chemical engineering curriculum. There is a growing interest in the formation of engineers that understand the importance of sustainability and that are capable of driving engineering projects towards sustainable development. As a result, there is an increasing need for engineering graduates that can effectively apply sustainability concepts to the formulation of engineering solutions to real world problems.
The learning of sustainability concepts in the engineering classroom requires the creation of hands-on opportunities that allow students to propose the efficient solution of environmental problems. Nonetheless, the experiential practice of sustainability can be challenging in the classroom. While the concepts of sustainability, circular economies, and recycling can be taught and incorporated in different courses across the chemical engineering curriculum, the application of these concepts through hands-on classroom experiences can be difficult and often overlooked.
Samples produced from the lab’s injection molder using polymer pellets
Our project focuses on the incorporation of hands-on experiences that allow our students to practice sustainability concepts through the study of polymer processing, the economic analysis of circular economies, and the completion of recycling projects. Some of the educational benefits of our research are the generation of opportunities to work on projects directly related to sustainability, the promotion of sustainability practices in the chemical engineering program, and the dissemination of results within our campus and to the engineering education community.
Our sustainability research is sponsored by the UT Austin Green Fund
