Specific programme: HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
UPV/EHU Partner Status: Coordinator
UPV/EHU PI: Haritz Sardon

Project start: 01/07/2022
Project end: 30/06/2025

Brief description: Since the development of the first fully synthetic plastics in the early 20th century, these materials have become ubiquitous in our daily life. The production of plastics has increased considerably, reaching 368 million tons in 2019 and it is expected to double again by 2035. Today’s plastics are designed for performance, cost and durability without taking into consideration their life after use. This has resulted in an annual generation of plastic solid waste of 150 million tonnes. Tackling plastic waste problem is one of the top priorities yet most challenging objectives of the European Union, which has set ambitious policies (i.e. Green Deal) and aims to recycle 50 % of all post-consumer plastics by 2025. The design of plastics with recyclability built into their performance aiming for a circular plastics economy is gaining a lot of attention. With specifically designed monomers, reaction conditions can be used to select the direction of the monomer-polymer equilibrium. Therefore, chemical recycling to monomer presents an attractive alternative since the polymer waste is employed to close the loop in a circular economy process that recovers the economic value of the material.

Through PolyRec, Dr. Ainara Sangroniz proposes to tackle this growing global challenge, by developing highperformance polyurethane (PU) plastics that exhibit a closed-loop circular lifecycle while also having performance properties comparable to those of today’s poorly or nonrecyclable commodity plastics. In the outgoing phase, the fellow will develop an innovative class of intrinsically recyclable PUs at the Colorado State University under the supervision of Porf. Eugene Y. X. Chen. In the incoming phase, these will then be depolymerized into their building block monomers and repolymerized back into the PU’s at POLYMAT (University of the Basque Country), supervised by Prof. Haritz Sardon.