Patricia’s Research

Sustainable and Circular Engineering for the Elimination of End-of-life Plastics

Partnerships: PSU (Christian Pester), Ohio State University, University of Texas at Austin, OSU

Technological advances are required to engineer elimination of end-of-life Plastics (E3P) and maximize recycling and recovery. Therefore, it is imperative to develop holistic and systematic methods to assess design, and innovation toward Sustainable and Circular E3P (SCE3P).

We will conduct synergistic research in polymer chemistry, reaction engineering and molecular simulation to determine depolymerization properties and valorization processes under real plastic wastes. In collaboration with other laboratories, will be modelled supply networks to determine the effects on the wider chemical industry; behavioral studies to discern and influence the role of consumers; life cycle and circularity assessment to estimate environmental effects across global value chains. The obtained framework will be useful for all types of plastics, even though our experimental focus will be on polystyrene (PS) and poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET) due to their large market

Papers:

Patrícia Pereira, Phillip E. Savage, Christian W. Pester. 2023. “Neutral Hydrolysis of Post-Consumer Polyethylene Terephthalate Waste in Different Phases“. ACS Sustainable Chem. Eng. 2023, 11, 18, 7203–7209. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acssuschemeng.3c00946

Patrícia Pereira, Phillip E. Savage, Christian W. Pester. 2024. “Acid catalyst screening for hydrolysis of post-consumer PET waste and exploration of acidolysis“. Green Chemistry. 2024. https://doi.org/10.1039/D3GC03906D

Current Research

Peter’s Research

Previous Research:

Bita’s Research
Sesha’s Research
Tim’s Research