 For those of you who were here for our inaugural episode of this series in the fall, welcome back and thank you for returning. For those of you who are new to this series, I'm just going to take a minute to tell you what it's about and what we're trying to do before introducing the speakers today. So basically the tackling global challenges series, our goal is to highlight a particular problem area in sustainable energy or sustainability and provide useful information to a broad audience and insights on opportunities for developing new solutions. And I would say that our intent is to basically provide a forum where external experts can help educate us and the community about these important areas. Our hope is that it will also spur some creative thinking to develop new solutions. And if those solutions are in the form of innovations or inventions that can lead to new ventures, then that's something that we certainly love to support. It's a big part of what the Tomcat Center does and so we'd be happy to connect with you down the road if that may be. There's also many other resources here at Stanford to support that. So this year for the inaugural series, we picked the theme of plastic and specifically the environmental footprint of the production of plastics and the crisis of plastic pollution. We picked this area because it's a really big problem. It's also incredibly multifaceted as you'll see. And we think it's sort of ripe for many different kinds of innovations, whether they're science and technology innovations, innovations in logistics, perhaps even changes in policy to address this problem. So today we have two speakers who I will introduce very shortly. What we're going to do is they're going to give two presentations back to back. That'll be about 30 or 40 minutes and then there will be a question and answer session. So, Donica provided you with a link to Poll Everywhere. You can use that to submit questions. There are questions that have been submitted already. You can see those when you click on that link. You can also use that to vote for questions that you want to elevate to the top of the list to see the speaker's answer. So I'll do my best to draw some questions from that list that Donica, she just put the link in the chat as well. It should have been in your email. And then the other thing I want to call your attention to is that we do have a Tomcat Center linked in group. This is a great way to connect with a really broad and vibrant community of researchers researchers, scholars, innovators, entrepreneurs, investors, et cetera, working in these areas of sustainable energy and sustainability. So I would encourage you to join that linked in group if you haven't already. Okay. So with that, let me introduce our speakers today. We're incredibly fortunate to be joined by two people from the U.S. Department of Energy. Really helping create new innovations to solve important problems in energy and sustainability is what they do for a living. Our first speaker is Jack Lunard. Jack is currently a program director at ARPA-E. That's the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy. ARPA-E really supports high potential and high impact technologies, the development of these technologies that are too early for the private sector, but have great potential to have a transformative impact. And they rely heavily, almost exclusively on the expertise and creativity of their program directors to really identify the opportunity areas to put out calls for funding and really craft the programmatic content. So Jack has served in this role since 2019. Prior to joining ARPA-E, he was the VP of Business Development for the Strategic Development Group at Chesapeake Utilities. And part of that, he was the VP and CTO of the Gas Technology Institute. He has his interests live very much in the area of energy infrastructure, methane emissions reductions, low carbon fuels, and several other related areas. He's been responsible for creating a number of programs over the past couple of years at ARPA-E to target opportunities in these areas. His background is in chemical engineering, and he did his PhD across the bay at Berkeley in chemical engineering. So also joining us today with really sort of a complementary perspective on the problem area, as you'll see, is Jay Fitzgerald. I've actually known Jay for more than 10 years. He was one of the first graduate students I met when I started here at Stanford in 2009. So he did his PhD work here in the chemistry department with my colleague, Jayton Kosa. After graduating, he became a science and technology policy fellow at the U.S. Department of Energy that's sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a very prestigious fellowship. He started out in the Office of Science at the DOE, developing programs for basic research, and then I think his interests evolved into the applications. So he migrated over to EERE and specifically the bioenergy technologies offices. He started there as a technology manager helping to craft new programs in the areas of synthetic biology and plastic, performance advantage plastics, chemical and biological plastic conversions, and recently was promoted to chief scientists for the bioenergy technology office. So I just want to make one disclaimer before I turn it over to them. They have very kindly offered their time and their insights today to share with you. They are here as individuals. They are not speaking on behalf of the Department of Energy. So please don't interpret any of the views or ideas they express as DOE policy. So with that, let me turn it over to Jack and Jay. Thank you so much for joining us. Well, hi, this is Jack Munard. Thanks, Jay, for the kind introduction. Just want to check that you can see my screen that I'm putting up. Okay, great. Well, on behalf of Jay, I'd like to start by saying thanks to Matt for inviting us to speak today and also to Danika for her help getting this presentation together. As Matt mentioned, I'll be covering the first part of the presentation, then I'll hand off to Jay. And I'm hoping that the level of discussion is such in this presentation that it intrigued you, but I've tried to intentionally keep it not too deep so that we have space for the questions. But please feel free to dig in as we go through the talk here. So let me start out with the first slide by just prefacing. Matt asked us to outline the challenges around plastics, a topic which has really gotten increased attention in recent years. This slide is really intended to outline the situation with plastic packaging materials, including highlighting the well-known observation that soon there will be more plastics and fish in the sea. But while the 78 tons of plastic packaging may be highly visible, it's only the tip of the iceberg. And so let's dig down a little bit deeper here. But first, let's ask the question, what are our goals and what are the options here? Just like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, there's kind of a pyramid of options here, layers of objectives. At the bottom, the core objective is to keep plastics out of the environment. That means landfilling, perhaps, but it's certainly better than having the plastics escape into the sea and create degradation across the environment. Moving up, though, from just landfilling, with the opportunity to look at energy recovery from these plastics, the embedded energy is pretty significant, several quads of energy. That's considered downcycling, by the way, kind of a negative-sounding term. But I think we could all agree it's better than just putting in a landfill. And as we move up the chain, well, maybe instead of just capturing the energy content, we can capture the chemical value is upcycling. And that's kind of where my talk is going to focus. The intent here is to cover these initial topics and then let Jay take you to the next level and onto the top of the pyramid. So we're not just going to start at the bottom of the pyramid, we're going to start at the bottom of everything, which is collecting the garbage. It's almost essential to start by recognizing that before we can get into the world of plastics recycling, we first have to deal with the solid waste problem. And it's a first step in what's a long and extensive and technically challenging path to managing plastics. And it's a big job. It's 2 billion tons of solid waste a year and it's getting bigger every day. It tends to be a locally managed problem. Plastics are just a small part of the solid waste, typically less than 20%. So right away, we need to face the issues of separation and contamination. And those two issues carry through all of the rest of the steps that will be discussed. So let me say a few words about collecting garbage. It's expensive primarily because of transportation costs. And the business model for trash often relies on subsidies because after all, it's trash. It's not a product. So the challenge is how to get people to pay to get rid of it responsibly instead of paying nothing and dropping it on the ground. And so as we talk about managing plastics and trying to climb up our pyramid to the highest levels, I think one of the things that we have to recognize from the very beginning is we need to look at creating financial incentives. And that's going to require rethinking the entire business model of garbage. And remember, it's not just the plastic waste we make today that we have to deal with. 80% of the plastic that's ever been made is still with us. So we need to figure out how to cover the costs for going back and collecting this legacy plastic that's still out there and essentially paying for it in the rears. I think a lot of times there's a misconception that this plastic problem is a problem of the poor countries. And it's not exclusively a poor country problem. It's interesting, the United States collects more than 95% of its solid waste, but we consume so much plastic that we still manage to rank amongst the top coastal polluters. And that's before we acknowledge that the U.S. and a lot of other rich countries have historically exported a significant amount of their plastics into poorer countries. Now, more recently, China and other Asian countries have started to impose bans on this essentially transfer of plastic and other waste. And the updated Basel Convention is seeking to eliminate this practice completely. But again, we have to recognize that this whole issue is not just a problem of poor countries, it's a problem for rich countries. So now that we have to keep what we make, let's talk about how we can recycle plastic and opportunities to make improvements. So remember the comment about separation and contamination. Now, the U.S. has settled on this philosophy of what's called single stream recycling, where residents and many commercial entities do minimal sorting, putting a mix of materials into blue bins. Sometimes our separation is poor, leading to contamination. Note that other countries, particularly in the EU, do a lot more upfront source separation, but that idea really hasn't caught on in the U.S. So what we have is a lot of blue bins and all that material goes to one of about 500 MRS or material recovery facilities. I'm sorry, about 500 of these MRS are in the U.S. And these MRS take on the next level of sorting, using a mix of machines, humans, and artificial intelligence, depending on the sophistication of the facility, and they separate what comes in into saleable products. It costs about $75 to $100 a ton to process what comes in. And depending on the MRF, as much as 20% of what comes in is either not recyclable materials at all, or so contaminated that it needs to go to the landfill after paying that money to sort it. It's quite painful, since it costs about $50 a ton to landfill, and the cost of the landfill and poorly separated blue bin waste can erase any margin from selling profitable items like aluminum and cardboard. So again, we need technology to reduce costs, probably new business models, and equally important, a lot of education, so people put the right stuff in their blue bin and put the other stuff in the trash. So aside from being expensive, plastics recycling is hard. And why is hard? Well, first, because you're so much of it, the first slide alluded to that 78 million tons of packaging is just the tip of the iceberg. But annual plastic production is approaching 400 million tons a year. Now, to give you an idea with that metric, that's roughly two thirds of the mass of all human beings. So some place out there, there is a two thirds, maybe a four to five foot statue or view made out of waste plastic being created this year. It's a staggering number. And remember, about 90% is single use. So think Coke bottles instead of Tupperware. And when you look in the US, our three million tons of recycled plastics out of 36 million tons produced reflects that we have a long way to go. So why is this? Well, first of all, only a few of the plastics that are labeled as recyclable are actually recycled. PET bottles and high density polyethylene are the money makers. The rest of this stuff, not so much so. There's an emerging technology for polypropylene, but the rest of this stuff, they don't even want to see in the blue bin. That all contributes to that $50 of waste landfill after you've paid the $75 to sort it. Even the two most profitable and easiest to recycle materials, PET bottles and HDPE bottles have only about a 30% recycling rate in the United States. So we have to ask her question, why is this so hard? Well, the first thing to note is it's more expensive to recycle than to use fossil resources to make new plastics. So you have a tremendous financial disincentive. Contamination means that valuable plastics get thrown out and good plastics get degraded by tramp materials. And even within a category, say HDPE or LDPE, there are thousands of grades of plastics, each with unique properties, additives, colors, etc. You can't make a quality product from a broad mixture of plastics, even within a single class, without first deconstructing the plastics all the way back to the monomer building blocks. And in the case of thermoset plastics, it may not even be possible to break these back into monomers at all. So in addition to the sorting, the contamination and chemistry problems, there's also regulatory issues. For example, I think most people would probably be cautious about using recycled materials and food packaging, or for implanting medical devices. So let's assume we've collected the garbage, sorted the plastics, and now we want to monetize these plastics. Well, the simplest option is to burn the plastics to recover energy. And burning plastics to make electricity is about between about 25 and 30 percent efficient. So it's not the greatest thing to do, but it's a way to monetize it. But there's a challenge there. First of all, waste energy plants are not very common, at least in the United States, who are several that were built in the 80s and 90s, but not much since then. The other thing is plastics were never their target. The waste to energy business model is based on tipping fees, and operating permits limit the amount of energy they can run through the plant. So they prefer trash with low heating value per unit of mass. Plastics are exactly the opposite. There's some of the highest heating value per pound of materials that you can find. And so they're much less profitable to process in a waste energy plant. Well, and the second problem is that the whole price of electricity, which supported these waste energy plants, continues to fall, putting their economics in peril. And finally, of course, nobody wants a waste energy plant in their backyard in the United States, especially in the urban areas where the waste is. So the picture at the top here, this is the old Philly waste incinerator. It's long since shut down, and it's now been converted into a riverfront entertainment district. In contrast, in the EU, where waste energy is much more common, they build waste energy plants in the middle of their cities that win architectural awards, and in fact, double a ski areas and climbing walls. This is one Copenhagen. So before we give up on the topic burning waste, I just want to mention that there is another area, and that's the cement manufacturing. Cement is a very energy intensive product. And cement kilns are known as omnivores. And this is an industry that has long sought out opportunity fuels. So there will probably always be an option to burn some plastics for energy recovery, even if that's not necessarily the best use of the plastics or the highest value. So what are some of our options if we're not just going to burn the plastics for energy recovery? And there's several chemical processes that you can look at. These are classes of chemical processes, pyrolysis, catalytic cracking, catalytic deprolimerization amongst them. Moving down this list of options, the processes become more selected to higher value products, but it also comes with a higher cost and more sensitivity to contaminants. There are several pyrolysis projects around the world, and even in the United States, that are online and even more getting built. These other technologies are being researched, including by Jade's Group and by RPE. Maybe just to say a few words about what RPE is doing in this area. Earlier this year, we launched our reuse program. It's a fairly modest $4 million exploratory program, testing whether small modular plants could get built that would flange up with the size of a mirf, so about 100 to 500 tons per day. And the idea here is that it's very hard to move waste. It's very expensive. So what you do is you build the plants where the waste is aggregated so it doesn't have to be moved and instead you make a liquid which is easily transported. And our goal is to try and make a fungible high-energy liquid product with these modular plants. We've got four teams and they're exploring a range of products from a refinery blend stock that would essentially compete with crude oil at about $50 a barrel to one that's looking to make lube stocks worth up to as much as $10 a gallon. RPE is also recently announced its Open21 program. So Open21 is just that. RPE accepts ideas in any topic related to energy. And there's $100 million available. Hopefully, this talk is going to stimulate some of your ideas. And if so, the good news is if you have good ideas, you still have plenty of time to get your concept papers in there due April 6. So I hope we see a couple of proposals come out of this talk today. So I'd like to close with a slide that I borrowed from Jay. It addresses what could be in terms of jobs and economic impact. I started my talk by noting that plastics represent an environmental and an energy challenge, but they also represent an economic opportunity. Now, Jay's going to pick up the story where I leave off seeking the higher value propositions for plastics and taking it to the top of the pyramid. So with that, I'd like to say thanks for your attention, look forward to questions. And Jay, the floor is yours. All right. Can you all hear me? Yes. All right, perfect. I'm just going to go ahead and put this in presentation mode here. Great. I just wanted to echo Jack thanks to Matt and to the Tomcat Center for inviting us here to speak today. It's really an honor to be able to talk to all of you. And Jack has done the really hard work of painting the picture of, you know, how do we handle waste as the environmental challenge that it is and make sure that it doesn't end up in our environments and that we can actually do something with it instead of using it for, you know, just putting it into landfills or burning it. I'm going to take a little bit of a different perspective and talk about what we might be able to do if we're actually able to sort some of the different contaminants that come along with plastics out and what we might be able to turn plastics into. And I think there's been a lot of talk about how we handle plastics as a waste management issue. And I think that's first and foremost. And that's, you know, the reason why I think Jack led this off. And that's I think the most important issue to cover here. One that's not talked about a lot is how plastics actually represent a climate opportunity as well. A lot of energy actually goes into manufacturing plastics. And what you can see here is that in the industrial sector, plastics are a significant amount of the energy or the greenhouse gas emissions that the United States produces. And the industrial sector is actually fairly large. And so we think about other types of sectors that we might want to decarbonize as a carbon of energy. Plastics are actually somewhat comparable to things like fuel use for aviation or fuel use in ships and boats, which might not be intuitive. Since we think we burn so much fuel, you know, every time we take a plane flight, but plastics actually are comparable to that. But they're inherently really hard to decarbonize because they are carbon based. And until we come up with a different type of base material for these types of things, we're going to continue to need to make them out of carbon. So plastics account for about 2% of domestic greenhouse gas emissions. And as you can see here, they're comparable to these other sectors. But with that said, not all plastics are created equal in terms of, you know, how much greenhouse gas emissions they produce in their in their manufacturing. We recently funded a consortium called the bottle consortium that I'll talk about in a little bit. And they ran an analysis basically trying to outline through using the tool called the manufacturing flow through industries, what each of the supply chain energy consumptions were for every type of plastic polymer produced, or at least for about the top 20 or so. What you can see here is that plastics consume a varying amount of energy in different types of polymers like polyethylene here at the top is the most commonly used plastic. But there are things down here like PC polycarbonate that actually consume or actually create much more greenhouse gas emissions. And I don't know if you can see my cursor here, but they create much more greenhouse gas emissions than you would think based on their actual amount of consumption. So it gives us some sense of what what good targets might be if we're trying to approach this problem from a greenhouse gas perspective. And so we know what these plastics are now and we have kind of a baseline created in terms of what things we can target. And I did want to highlight here too that plastics consume about 3% of total US energy use, and that's really an energy efficiency opportunity, I think in addition to a greenhouse gas opportunity. So if you can make production more efficient through a variety of different means, you might be able to limit that total supply chain energy. So I think one of the next questions you might ask is why not just stop using plastic overall? And I think it's a great question. We're often encouraged to use things like reusable shopping bags or to substitute things like aluminum cans for plastic bottles. And those are those are great ideas. And I think that they do have really a role to play in limiting single use plastics. But it is a complicated story, because things like cotton bags have about 130 times the global warming potential that a single use plastic bag does. So you have to reuse that plastic bag or sorry, that cotton bag about 130 times before they're going to break you in from a greenhouse gas perspective. And I mentioned that not because we shouldn't be using cotton bags, we certainly should. But just just because you have to use them a lot more than you might think, because plastics are a really efficient material to produce. And so they also have very large benefits in terms of the way that our society uses them to do things like preserve or prevent food spoilage. And so there have been some estimates in terms of the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that we save through being able to continue to use food that would have expired if it didn't have plastic packaging around it. And it's around 10% of the amount of energy that went into food. So those have really important implications for when we use plastics and when we use alternatives. And I don't want to come off here, I guess, as a plastic evangelist. I think I'm just raising these points to kind of say, we need to think about how we can really efficiently use plastics, because they're going to be around and they're going to be needed to be made more efficient in order for us to keep using them and use them in a sustainable manner. On the right side here, you can see total energy, global warming potential acidification and smog from a variety of different recycled plastics. And we know that we can recycle plastics using today's technologies, like Jack mentioned, most often mechanical recycling. And they really do save a lot of the greenhouse gas emissions when you use these recycled materials to create new plastics. Unfortunately, also as Jack mentioned, there's really low recycling rates. So we don't get these things into the system enough for those benefits to really be realized. In addition, Jack also mentioned downcycling, or which is what mechanical recycling often leads to versus a closed loop. And so you might think when you recycle a PET bottle that you can make a new PET bottle out of that. But almost all the PET bottles that are recycled go into things like the manufacture of carpet fiber or other types of kind of fiber based materials rather than going into a new plastic bottle. And that highlights the need for closed loop recycling. And closed loop recycling is going to mean that you can break things back down into monomers or into other chemical intermediates that can then be used to produce similar quality materials. And that's a lot of what we're trying to do in EERE is look at how can we create that type of cycle. And so new technologies have that potential for same cycling and they also have other energy and environmental benefits. So to flip back to Jack's slide here, I'm going to kind of focus on the minimizing fossil content and maximizing chemical energy recovery bits of the pyramid here. And then we'll save a little bit of time at the end to talk about kind of the tip of the pyramid and how we can more holistically redesign the system as a whole. But there are two basic things that we focus on at EERE when trying to tackle this problem and they really do fall into these two categories. So what do ideal solutions look like here in terms of redesigning plastics and also in terms of redesigning recycling processes? So if you were to redesign plastics, you would redesign them with the end of life concerns in mind and really with those things up front so that you knew how the plastic was either going to be recycled or how the plastic was going to degrade in the environment or a compost facility as you were designing it. You'd also have to design them to be compatible with current infrastructure. There are a lot of stories out there that are when things that were designed as biodegradable materials have gotten into recycling facilities and because they have chemical triggers in them that are meant to break the material down, they actually can contaminate much larger versions of failed material. And so you have to be really careful when you're designing these new types of materials that you design them to be compatible with today's infrastructure or with a very slight variance on today's infrastructure that's likely to be implemented soon. And like Jack said, these many material recovery facilities often operate on really razor-thin margins. And so you have to make sure that you're not creating too large of an ask for those people who are actually doing the sorting of the waste to be able to utilize your new material. Ideally, on the next bullet, you would create things that are performance advantaged. And so you could recreate polyethylene exactly from a biobased source and maybe you could lower the greenhouse gas emissions. But ideally, you could create a new material that had properties similar to polyethylene, but maybe that was more easily recyclable or that that could actually biodegrade in the environment. And lastly, you want to think about lowering the global warming potential of these materials by using things like biolayer materials or using different types of processing techniques. So the second major thing I wanted to talk through today in terms of things that we could focus on are how we could improve recycling processes. And so mechanical recycling is great, but basically what happens there is that you take the recycled material, you chip it up, and then you blend and compatibilize those chips, and then you're able to put those into some sort of processors like an extruder to make a new type of plastic. But every time you do that, you're going to end up with worse properties than in your starting material. And so we took as our baseline kind of how do we improve on mechanical recycling? How can we create intermediate streams that actually have the ability to be upgraded efficiently into final end products? We want these recycling processes also to be tolerant of things like contaminants, energy and material efficient, and work with things like maybe not unsorted material, but at least unsorted plastics or be able to be tolerant of things that are going to come along with plastics in terms of a recycling stream. And maybe then also look at nontraditional feedstocks here. So with all those challenges in mind, we at the DOE launched an initiative to tackle those challenges. And one of the first things that we did, because the Department of Energy has such a wide-ranging national laboratory complex that handles or is able to really put forward innovative solutions to ideas, was we sort of charged the national laboratories with coming up with ideas on how you would tackle this plastic waste problem. And through that process, the Bottle Consortium was launched. And this was about a $10 million a year effort on FY21. So this September was the official kickoff of the consortium. And the consortium has a vision to deliver the types of selective and scalable technologies that enable this type of recycling that we've been talking about. And their mission really is to develop robust processes that can handle these types of existing and new plastics waste, as well as to design new plastics that are recyclable or biodegradable by design. And you can see a few of the metrics here that the consortium came up with. Those include things like 50% energy savings relative to virgin material. We know that that's possible with mechanical recycling and downcycling. But that only actually is able to access a fraction of the different types of plastics that would be utilized. So we're going to try to do that for all different types of plastics so that we can get all of those up to that 50% energy savings bar. In addition, we're looking at carbon recovery. So it's very easy to take a plastic stream and maybe pick out 10% of it and trash the other 90% and make a high value product. But really, at the end of the day, that doesn't solve our problem. What we want is processes that are material efficient. It can actually capture the carbon and capture the value in the material so that that can go on to have a second life. And lastly, the bottle consortium in particular is focused on upcycling. And upcycling is providing an economic incentive above the price of reclaimed material. So being able to use a deconstructed stream in a novel application, that might actually get you a higher value for your material. And so Greg Beckham is the PI shown here for that consortium. And it's a collaboration between a variety of different universities and national laboratories. We actually were fortunate enough to add a slack to our membership team this fall, which has been a great addition to the community to be able to look at some of the catalytic processes that we're using to break down plastics in a little bit more detail and have a better mechanistic understanding of how those things happen. So at the end of the day, the bottle consortium really is trying to do what's shown here on the right of the screen, which is to go from a linear economy for plastics to something that's more of a circular economy. And I'll expand on that theme in a second here. So this is what the consortium likes to call their placemat slide, which is I guess if you're trying to educate your kids, you can give this to them while they eat so that they can pick up on some of the themes here. I'm not quite sure how well that would work with my second grader, but it's always worth a try, I guess. So the idea here is to take plastic waste and to deconstruct that plastic waste through some sort of either a biological or chemical process. And so the things that they're looking at are thermal catalysis, electric catalysis, biocatalysis, and photo catalysis. And we're doing a lot of techno economic and life cycle analysis on all of the different types of projects that are proposed within the consortium to make sure that they can meet the metrics that we propose and that they're going to be efficient processes. So once you're able to deconstruct that plastic waste into a raw material that's ready for reuse, you can either think about how you would make a new upcycle material out of that that could then have have an end of life designed into it, or you can think about how you might add things like new biomass based monomers to interact with your deconstructed raw material from your fossil based plastics to create a new recycling loop. And so those are the two types of projects that we're really looking at in terms of end products here. I wanted to throw in this slide just to give everyone a little bit of a chance to realize where the opportunities are from a greenhouse gas emissions perspective for plastics. And so this jewel paper that I referenced earlier broke down for things like polyethylene or or PET where the different emission sources are for each of those plastics. And so what you can see here in blue is that the chemical feedstocks for a plastic account for about half of the greenhouse gas emissions that are associated with a plastic, a final plastic product. The other large chunks there are things like the actual processing to create the plastics and to create the plastic resins. So those are the two things that are kind of the biggest bang for your buck in terms of greenhouse gas emissions improvements when you're thinking about how you want to create a new a new type of plastic. So some ideas that we're exploring are using things like biobased monomers or recycled content like I mentioned earlier, but also looking at things like biological processing or low temperature catalytic processing to limit the amount of emissions that are created through your your plastic production process. You can also think about things like logistics improvements or using green electrons versus you know grid average electrons to be able to improve the green house gas profile of your materials. I wanted to briefly offer one example of that and I I promise I wouldn't promise Matt I wouldn't get too much into the chemistry here. So I tried not to put any chemical formulas on here, but you will see a little bit of chemistry. And if if Bob Weymouth is actually in the audience he is probably wondering why his picture is on the slide here, but I in talking to Bob Allen who's here on the left and actually developed this IBM Volcat process he made me promise about giving this seminar at Stanford to be able to give give a shout out to Bob Weymouth for looking at a lot of the base catalyzed e polymerization processes that eventually led to this Volcat process. And the Volcat process is a really interesting process that checks a lot of the boxes that I mentioned on the previous slide. So it uses a volatile amine catalyst that's relatively in extensive and that catalyst can selectively cleave ester bonds in polyethylene terephthalate which has those those a little bit weaker bonds while leaving other polymers intact. And so what you can imagine with this is that you could do things like sequential processing. And so what I've shown here are some really dirty types of PET inputs. And this is the stuff that material recyclers are actually faced with and so at the top here you see clean colored flake which has about 0.5% contaminants and that is one thing which was surprising to me when starting learning more about plastic waste is that even this stuff is considered by the people who want to make say a new plastic bottle to be unusable because it has a half a percent of contaminants and it's going to have color contaminants more importantly. And so being able to remove all of those contaminants is really critical to being able to same cycle this type of waste. It so happens that this IBM bull cap process because it can operate at low temperatures and with really selective chemistry can take even dirtier feedstocks than that. So it can take things like curbside dirty mixed contaminants and after you sort of liquefy I guess all of your PET that's in there through this volatile amine hydrolysis process you end up being able to filter out everything else that was contaminating this and I've just shown a little piece of filter paper here with a couple different types of plastic remnants that are on there that were obviously not PET. In talking to Bob Allen he said that when they run this process at larger scales they'll actually see a giant glob of PET floating up to the top of their reactor and so it actually makes a giant ball of all the things that actually don't dissolve in their volatile amine catalyst and so you could think about this in terms of these sequential processing types of things and how you could recover multiple materials out of one deconstruction set. So at the end of the day they're able to produce this clean colorless monomer and the monomer can then be recalimerized into things like bottles or into other types of upcycled products or same-cycle products and they're starting to look at things like how could you use this for textiles to recover cotton which is also another valuable compound that's interwoven with PET to make a lot of clothing. Also things like multi-layer packages or things like carpet that have inorganic backing and none of these things are recyclable in any way today and so they're part of that plastic that went straight into kind of the trash fraction that Jack was talking about in terms of having no reasonable application or no way to recycle those things given the technology that we're looking at or that's in the market today. So moving on from that example to where do we see this going overall at the Department of Energy? So we started this past I guess it was in 2019 that it was officially kicked off but the Plastic Innovation Challenge and as part of that challenge we've gotten together with colleagues that my office EERE, well the Office of Science, RPE and our colleagues at Fossil Energy and come up with kind of a draft of a roadmap for where the challenges and opportunities are for plastic over the coming 10-year period. And as part of that we've developed some metrics that we think are achievable by 2030 you know given appropriate emphasis on plastic R&D and those are to develop technologies to address things like end-of-life state for 90% of materials. I mentioned that earlier we're trying to kind of bring everything up to the baseline that mechanical recycling can produce today on select materials but as part of those we also want to hit those energy savings and those carbon utilization metrics and we also at the end of the day want to be cost competitive with incumbent plastic materials and processes and I think like like Matt mentioned sort of at the outset that may rely on things like policy incentives to be able to use reclaimed or recycled materials to make them cost competitive because I think as Jack mentioned the plastic precursors that are used today are just very very cheap on a per pound basis to you know make these things and there's less of an incentive to use this recycled material. So I wanted to close my talk basically by going back and referencing Jack's pyramid again here. We've discussed a couple of ways in my talk of minimizing fossil-based content and maximizing chemical recovery and Jack talked a lot about chemical recovery as well as energy recovery and baseline and the most important thing here which is just keeping plastic out of the environment. We think that by creating these novel types of technologies we'll be able to create the incentives for less plastic to end up in the environment in the first place if we if people see it as sort of a valuable feedstock instead of as a waste management problem so we have a long way to go until we get to that point and so I just wanted to point out too that there are both an environmental challenge with with plastic and keeping it out of the environment and there's also an energy problem. Plastics consume a lot of energy and sometimes those things are at odds right like if you just left your plastic in a landfill it might actually have a better greenhouse gas emissions profile because it's going to fit your carbon's going to fit locked up in a landfill versus being reused but at the end of the day we have to solve both of these problems simultaneously and come up with sustainable ways to use our plastic resources and so I just put a couple of different things like collection sorting recycling and upcycling and redesign here but really happy to hear what the community thinks about this problem and happy again to answer any sorts of questions that you all might have that might help you further think through the innovative solutions that I know you all are growing up right now so with that I'll go ahead and close and turn it back over to Matt. Fantastic thank you Jay and Jack for really terrific presentations and I think a tremendous amount to ponder and food for innovation so we really appreciate that. Yeah there is a lot to ask about I will Jay I'll make a conscious effort not just to ask chemistry questions although I certainly have a lot of those maybe I'll start kind of at the bottom like like Jack suggested at the garbage and that the sorting I mean you pointed out some major problems you know associated with sorting and collecting and what a burden that is for the MRFs and how it affects the whole business plan so what does an innovation in sorting look like I mean is it really just sort of a cultural issue in the US that we just don't there's some resistance to having individuals sort and if you could overcome that or change that then it would open up a lot of more attractive options or other technology solutions you see more technology at the MRF or prior to the MRF that could that could help with that problem and I think Jack's having trouble connecting on that. Yeah so it's interesting you know there's a lot of new sensors out there that are used everything from infrared to much more sophisticated techniques to actually scan material as they were coming across and what you do is you hit like with a puff of air or something to push those materials into a sorting bin there's a lot of artificial intelligence you know optical sorters you know because you have a can but what about a crushed can how does that look and when you see a crushed model is it a PET bottle or is that a detergent bottle and so there's been tremendous advantage advances in terms of automation using artificial intelligence to you know one get humans out of the equation because it's a pretty nasty job but also it allows you to go much much faster and with much higher precision um but but clearly one of the most important things to do is to educate people is what they put in that blue bin in the first place so I don't want to say we need better people but but you know you know more sophisticated technology helps but certainly more education would go a long way as well those are some thoughts yeah I don't know if you had some as well no yeah I think I think those are great thoughts I think sorting is sorting and collection are one of the biggest challenges here and without that you can't apply any of the advanced technologies you know that we're we're trying to develop and so it really is reliant on making sure that we capture you know capture all the plastic waste to be able to do something useful with it great and then sort of moving up the the pyramid a little bit um I this is for jack and j maybe maybe a little bit more for jack but um you mentioned so it's so if I just burn the plastic um to create electricity it's about 25 to 30 percent so that's chemical energy and electricity out presumably on the yeah that's correct yeah and that's just that's just a function of car no efficiency you know a coal fired power plant the most advanced ones are maybe 35 to 40 efficient and okay waste energy plants aren't quite as efficient as that so so at the end of the day so if I'm doing a fuel if I'm making a liquid fuel you highlighted that as sort of one of the options I'm not sure if that did this more pyrolysis or cracking or one of the sort of thermal methods for taking the stream that you can't recycle and putting it into a liquid fuel you know there's some energy of course associated in doing that that conversion what are you sort of targeting as your ultimate of energy recovery efficiency I guess is what I would say you know relative to this baseline of just putting it in the incinerator to make electricity yeah I think I think you could say that kind of a starting target efficiency would be at least 50 so compared to 25 for electric generation and really it boils down to you know not just what your energy conversion efficiency but can you convert that to valuable products so for example if you heat the plastics up too much you may crack the plastics and make a lot of light gases like methane which are less valuable methane's worth $3 a million BTU you know a liquid that's in the range of gasoline or diesel is worth five times as much and then the other thing you got to watch out for like goldilocks if you go too far and you heat too much you make char and char you know it's kind of like coal so to speak so you can still use it as a fuel but it's very very low value and so it really represents a degradation so it's you know I think like I say 50% energy conversion but what you'd really like to see is maybe 75% or higher to high value products so you're getting both the efficiency and the dollar gain okay so these these sort of modular facilities that you envision would they be targeting one product or do you imagine the sort of mini refineries that would produce a few different streams maybe a really high value lubricant and then and then some liquid fuels or is that just not feasible on that scale of a couple hundred tons a day well so you know it depends on what you're putting in so the folks who are looking at making these lube stocks are looking to try and take in polyolefin so HDPE LDPE polypropylene and those molecules can be unzipped with their catalyst to make these lube oils if you look at what WRI is doing they're looking at trying to take a broad cut of things you know including those those plastics that nobody even wants to see getting into the mirf and their technique is I'll say it's it's more of a hammer you know and they're just going to try and make a lube oil I'm sorry a a crude type feedstock which would be lower value but but you can take a lot more material in and it's a lot more robust and so maybe it's still quite profitable even though the the margins on a dollar per unit volume basis are are lower okay okay thanks um and and sort of moving to recycling um at so this is mostly for Jay but but certainly for both of you if you have thoughts so um thinking about sort of the high level goal of the bottle initiative um you know improving the the recycling for all materials do you um you certainly talked about like the chemical recycling and I had some questions around that but is there a real room for major improvements in mechanical recycling I mean you sort of describe the the problems with it um and the fact that you almost inevitably end up at a lower value you know product out of that recycled material than the one that that goes in do you see opportunities there for innovations that could change that picture and then and then yeah well I guess I'll ask my related question after that yes it's it's the first question yeah I think that's a great question um mechanical recycling is not something that we specifically focused on improving with with that initiative but that's kind of because we took a you know what is what is what do we think is being under explored right now um sort of perspective on the problem but I think that mechanical recycling is going to be part of any sort of solution um you know in many ways it's an upfront step for a lot of what might be viewed as as chemical processes like you're going to need to get these things ground into some sort of material that you can feed into reactor no matter what and so having um you know those frontend steps of mechanical recycling I think are going to be really critical as far as what the the biggest barriers to improving that are I mean it's it's right now it's just a lot they have to do so much washing of that material that it becomes really energy and water intensive um to be able to process plastics through there you know if there are um advances that can somehow you know limit the limit the amount of water and limit the amount of energy that goes into um mechanical recycling I think those could be really impactful but that's you know a really hard problem to solve because then you the less you wash you know the more dirty your product is and the harder it is to you know upcycle or same cycle that material I see so so for the so then what is to be done and maybe this intersects you know back with with some of the the technologies that that Jack's program is looking at but what is so you talked about the polyester and and I you know that's pretty clear to see you know the chemical strategy for for chemical recycling there but but for the you know hydrocarbon backbones um yeah there's some of the un unzipping I guess that Jack alluded to but but how do you see all of those fitting into the idea of trying to go back to monomer that you could then turn back into plastic and to recover value that way yeah I mean I think that's a great question I mean making you know making ethylene again out of plastics doesn't seem like a great use of a material that's already already got a lot of carbon carbon bonds formed in it and so I think what you're going to want to do at the end of the day is be able to rake it into things like Jack talked about that are that are chunks that are useful for a different type of application and you know depending on how much of these types of oils you could produce you could perceive you know using those as a as a feedstock for all sorts of types of new chemical processes you know some of those are going to require you know doing some oxidative chemistry on your you know smaller like smaller oligomeric chunks of material to be able to feed those into either you know a new catalytic process or even a new biological process we have some projects that are looking at you know if you are are able to make things like a bunch of carbox you know small molecular weight carboxylic acids how can you biologically funnel those into then a single product and that's obviously you know additional process steps so you lose some energy efficiency and you add some cost but you know it's at least possible to think about how you could channel some percentage of those into those high value applications and use bulk material for you know other types of applications where you weren't able to valorize it in a different way. Okay and you touched on this a little bit in your talks but I think there's a lot of interest in the audience in this area so can you comment in general on you know where you see biodegradable plastics fitting into to this picture there's obviously you know tremendous benefits to biodegradability if things end up being released and there's there's a lot of stuff being released into the environment but there are challenges that you alluded to briefly you know with respect to the recycling system so so what do you think is kind of the ideal solution there? I can offer an initial thought you know there's there's you know horses for courses as they say so so biodegradability is a very valuable property but but I think you want to make sure that you're matching that property against the uses that you're looking at so for example there are you know high-density polyethylene you know fabrications that are intended to last years you know they line for example they line the bottom of rail cars with HDPE to improve the flowability of things like coal and gravel out of the bottom and so when we look at biodegradability I think it's not a one-size-fits-all you know there's going to be applications for plastics particularly single-use short-lived you know materials you know the the classic is the you know the the plastic bag that you bring home your groceries in single use five-minute life you know then it's it's going to be thrown away but I think you know if you look at that 400 million tons of plastics there's probably at least half of that that's in applications where it may not be good to have your plastics falling apart before you want them to I'll just you know I don't want to sound negative about it I just want to point out that you know it's a it's a property where it's fit for purpose we should use it as much as we can I don't know Jay you probably have some more you know well-developed thoughts in this area no I think I think you're you're spot on Jack with what you said I think it has to be really application dependent well you know a couple things that I would add are we really don't have great certification methods for biodegradability right now and I think I saw Mike Biddle on a little bit earlier but I think he pointed out you know he's done you know his own informal experiments of just putting the biodegradable materials outside and seeing how long it takes them you know to go away in ambient conditions and it's a lot longer than is claimed and I think one thing that we've actually started down the road up is being able to develop or look at better certification processes or better standardized testing conditions for biodegradability to ensure that if you put that something biodegradable that it actually will biodegrade in reasonable conditions and you know that it's a really hard problem because it is different in soils it's different in the ocean which is much you know lower temperature and has lots of different conditions in it so even you know for biodegradability it's not one environmental you know it's not one one environmental degradation characteristics that you have to optimize for but I think like Jack said for some applications it's going to be really important and to me the ones where it's most important are for really things that are really tightly linked to food use where in an ideal system if you could clearly mark things those could all go towards something like composting you know if you if you had a system where you actually efficiently collecting compost and you could put your biodegradable materials in there they're much much more likely to be able to be grade under you know standard composting conditions than they are you know as sitting in the middle of the ocean or you know sitting just you know on someone's deck so I think it's a it's a really difficult process I think getting better standards it's going to be key and I think realizing it's not a like Jack said a silver bullet for all plastics because we do rely on them for so many things where we can't have them biodegrading you know before we want them to is another you know critical part of that yeah I think it relates back to the education issue you were talking about to do you know having standards that people know what they're buying but then also educating people about what about a readable product you know what what should be done with it and and you know what how to sort it right because it it obviously has radically different properties from the things you want to send into your recycling processes there's also I'm gonna I'm gonna leverage your your chemical biology background jade there's there's definitely interest and you alluded to some you know biological processes for for taking sort of converted feedstocks and trying to trying to convert them into into new polymers but what about just on the on the degradation side itself when you look at the at the technologies you talked about a chemical technology for depolymerizing pet what how do you sort of see the balance of opportunities between biological you know enzymatic breakdown versus chemical so you know I'm in the viral technology's office but you know to be blunt I think there's a lot more application for for chemical processes here I think there are really certain areas in which biological processes could have a really interesting role you know particularly for things like PET that was previously mentioned there's companies like Carbios that are developing you know enzymatic solutions to be able to cleave those bonds there's people developing things to cleave you know bonds and polyurethanes or other kinds of more labial bonds where enzymes can be really specific and go in and do what we know things like cellulases can do on biomass you know to cleave cellulose apart and I think there will be applications like that for which biology is well suited we're doing what we're doing a lot of in the bottle consortium is really looking at a TEA and LCA breakdown there to say when is it when are you actually going to see benefit you know particularly from a greenhouse gas emissions reduction perspective from utilizing a biological solution utilizing really low temperature processing for these types of things I think that's where we want to target you know those biological solutions versus you know trying to make them really stretch and do things that they're you know not particularly great at like breaking cc bonds I mean it is possible to break cc bonds in something like polyethylene with biology but maybe not practical there are other types of cc bonds like in polystyrene that maybe are more targetable and might have some sort of a you know eventual biological solution you know if you can find the right kinds of enzymes or organisms but it's going to be a much heavier lift than I think it is for things like like chemical processing at least in the in the short term yeah it seems like even just getting contact between the enzyme and a hydrographic piece of plastic is itself a challenge regardless of its activity for sure yep I have a sort of more general question really so when you show that energy breakdown both in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and then and then the energy going into plastic production obviously the recycling you know you can save that block associated with the feedstocks if you're if you're recycling right so there's big savings there but is the process energy so so how do you think of that because is yeah how much savings or can you have savings in the process energy block because now you have to add the energy of the deconstruction plus whatever purification you know new challenges arise if you're if you're creating monomers this way and then the energy of the polymerization which I realize is not the full process energy but but how do you sort of think about what the potential savings are if any in the process part yeah I think I think that's a great question um you know there are you know different types of polymerization methods that you know you you could potentially use that would be you know lower temperature or milder processing that people have you know been discussing with with green chemistry solutions to things you know I think a lot of it might be more you know synergistic with other things like say incorporating you know biobase monomers into something and then figuring out a new processing condition that uses those types of monomers and say partially petroleum monomers you know in a different type of process that was you know less energy intensive overall but I do I definitely hear you in terms of that being a difficult one to you know to really see massive improvements and and this is why you know I think for energy savings we're really looking at you know 50 50% supply chain energy which is I think a really ambitious target but it's you know given the administration you know love of deep decarbonization and saying things are going to be 100% you know carbon neutral this is one area where we're probably not going to get there you know without a radically changed method of something like producing plastics okay there's there may be a little bit of a twist on that story too you know a lot of the plastics that we use rely on aromatic compounds benzene tides isling and and these have largely come from refineries and in the future you know perhaps you know as we as we wean ourselves off the fossil fuels for transportation those sources could become more limited there are processes that you can use starting with plastics to make those molecules and so you're not necessarily you know fundamentally changing the energy content of the material but you've rearranged the molecules in a way that if you had to start from scratch it would be a very high energy input so um I hear what you're saying you know you're you know you probably can't save a lot of energy on the processing side but you may in the future allow yourself to have more flexibility for feedstocks is is fossil fuels get weaned out weaned the way and we need to find new routes to making chemicals that are otherwise valuable for us. Thanks Jackie. Yes I go ahead Jay. I want to add on to that but you made me think of Jack that's a really great point um so the the IBM process that I mentioned earlier actually I didn't put this on there but when they deconstruct a monomer they're actually deconstructing to a molecule called BHET which has the ethylene which has the glycol units on either side of your pterothalic acid so your monomer actually already has um you know is linked together and is going to take less processing energy to go to your final product than if you started with you know those monomers separately so that's another way we're using recycled content could save you not only on the feedstock side but actually in the processing side too since it requires less processing at the end of the day so that's probably a smaller example but just one way that you could you don't have to break plastic all the way back down into complete monomers you could break it back down into something like oligomers that can be built back up more easily is you're sort of targeting the deconstruction to the the the units that are the easiest to turn back into the the higher value that's great you guys I don't know if that was intentional not Jack but you you addressed had the currently the top question and the poll about you know what what happens to the the economics as petroleum decreases if transportation fuel starts to decline maybe since we're getting a little bit late I'll close with a question kind of a broad question related to this idea of sourcing and Jay or Jack or both of you could comment that so if you if you think about you know farming practices and the greenhouse gas footprint and the global warming potential farming practices then can you comment on sort of how you how you source bio-based feedstocks and how that can impact the overall life cycle of a you know a quote renewable polymer yeah I'm happy to take that one and feel free to add your your thoughts Jack too so sourcing bio-based materials to help to you know replace fossil inputs is something that we think about a lot in my office often it's for making things like fuels but I think the same principle applies for plastics um bio-based feedstocks are a complicated thing right you can do it very wrong you can you know grow really energy intensive crops and then utilize them in really energy intensive processes and actually end up with you know worse emissions than you would if you just use petroleum feedstocks so I'll preface this with you have to do it carefully but I think that when done right it can be really environmentally beneficial and so we take a lot of effort in doing our life cycle analyses on you know crops that are grown in different ways with different you know cropping practices things like purpose grown energy crops often can really help fix a lot of soil or fix a lot of carbon into the soil and so you can actually end up with you know potentially net negative materials because you've been actually been able to fix so much carbon into the soil through growing your crop that when you harvest and then turn that into a material your your total you know if your system boundary is the entire process you've actually fixed more carbon than you've put into things I wouldn't say that that's you know a typical thing for a bio biosource material but we're finding out is there are options even for things like corn that are grown now the newest estimates are that that's making ethanol out of that corn is about 40 percent less greenhouse gas intensive per you know gasoline gallon equivalent than using petroleum and there's ways that you know by tacking say like carbon sequestration or carbon utilization onto the fermenters that make those you know make that ethanol you can actually get that down even lower and so I think you know we're just beginning with with especially with the focus of this new administration on you know deep decarbonization and reducing global warming potential of product to think about all those options weigh them out in in terms of their techno-economic you know impacts and and tick the lowest hanging fruit to really improve the overall greenhouse gas emissions associated with you know bio-based feedstocks but I guess my message overall would just be you have to be careful and you have to do it right but I think there's a lot of potential yeah maybe I'll just add because I completely agree you've got to be careful you've got to do it right you know there's always been this notion of food versus fuel or or you know potential competition when you use biological source materials but it's important to point out that a lot of times biology may be trying to help us here in ways that we're not thinking about you know you know there's a biopolymer lignin which nobody wants to eat for really good reasons and it has a lot of very interesting properties and so perhaps we need to think about you know the the bio-refinery concept again in terms of what it could yield as far as novel materials for what may be plastics different than what we have today but the plastics that could have valuable properties by harvesting those parts of the of the biomass that really don't compete for for food or even for fuel in some cases it's great I yeah I think I'll take this opportunity to highlight what I actually what I hope has been a parent over the past an hour and 15 minutes or so that you know we I preface their talks by saying that you know Jack and Jay spent a lot of time thinking about crafting programs to help spur innovations and create new technologies and hopefully you've you've seen some of that today and really seen the tremendous potential of that what they what they also do which I think is a really critical piece of this this whole area is they spend a lot of time crafting programs and supporting researchers who really do the hard analysis to answer questions like this what what does and doesn't make sense with respect to the the problem we're trying to solve there's there's really a science in in conducting those types of analyses properly seeking out the right data and using that to to inform the solutions so in the interest of time I think I'm going to wrap up the the official Q&A session here I want to encourage you again to to join the the LinkedIn group connect with us at the the Tomcat Center with with additional follow-up and and let me let me just take the opportunity to thank our speakers once again for a really a really fantastic evening thank you so much for for spending time with us and lending us your your insights thank you the opportunity is really enjoyable thank you it's been a pleasure to be here and talk with you all thank you so much