The University of Birmingham, together with engineering firm Stopford, have been awarded further funding from UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI) Smart Sustainable Plastic Packaging (SSPP) Challenge. As a £60 million five-year programme, UKRI SSSP is an ambitious UK government investment in sustainable plastics research and innovation.
The University of Birmingham and Stopford had previously been awarded an amount in funding in 2022 for the development of a hydro-thermal process called CircuPlast that uses super critical water as a green solvent to enable the recycling of hard-to-recycle mixed waste polyolefin streams into a chemical feedstock. Those funds are being used to establish a demonstrator facility at Birmingham’s Tyseley Energy Park.
Dr Ben Herbert, Technology & Innovation Director at Stopford, said he was ‘delighted that our technology has once again been recognised by UKRI’s SSPP Challenge’ and with the additional £300k, which the team will use to expand the platform to include PET plastic, next to the on-going work on polyethylene and polypropylene.
The technology is a chemical recycling process that utilises hot compressed water as green solvent to selectively depolymerise waste plastics into commodity compounds which can be processed to produce virgin materials. The technology is capable of recycling contaminated and degraded plastics, and reduces the amount of downstream processing required.
It works by exploiting the behaviour of water in its supercritical state, where it exhibits reduced polarity, high solvating power for complex polymers like plastics. By virtue of combined intermediate heat and high pressure, it decomposes polymers at ‘selective spots’, thus producing target products at high proportions.
“Supercritical water technology is exciting, intriguing, and challenging,” said Professor Bushra Al-Duri, professor of sustainable process engineering at the University’s School of Chemical Engineering - and the inventor of the platform technology.
David Coleman, CEO at University of Birmingham Enterprise, was thrilled that a technology invented in Birmingham had come full circle back to the city, ‘which has fantastic facilities at the Tyseley Energy Park, and other spaces where companies can collaborate with the research base in a supportive environment.”
The University of Birmingham is ranked amongst the world’s top 100 institutions, and its work brings people from across the world to Birmingham, including researchers and teachers and more than 6,500 international students from nearly 150 countries.