REMADE Institute: Advancing the Nation in Sustainable Manufacturing

Foundational Projects The REMADE Institute was pleased to announce three foundational projects focused on the recycling and recovery of paper, fibers, and e-waste. These three projects marked the institute’s first official step toward achieving its objective of improving sustainable manufacturing in the U.S.

Platform Technology for Selective Recovery of Polymers and Residual Metals from Complex Polymeric Content Waste Streams, including e-Waste – Argonne National Laboratory This project will evaluate, validate, and confirm the effectiveness of a platform for selective materials separation technology that enables recovery of ABS, PS, ABS/PC alloy and PC from e-waste and other complex polymeric content waste streams. Benefits include increasing secondary materials, primarily polymers, by as much as 3.5 million ton/yr (> 100% increase vs. baseline), recovering more than 350 trillion Btu of embodied energy, and reducing GHG emissions by 17.4 MMTCO2e.

Assessment of the Impact of Single Stream Recycling on Paper Contamination in Recovery Facilities and Paper Mills – University of Miami This project will evaluate the impact of single stream recycling (SSR) on paper contamination in recovery operations and explore emerging recovery processes for minimizing fiber contamination. The benefits include reducing costs by $10M, reducing energy by 100tBtu/yr, and reducing CO2 emissions by 450 MMTCO2e for every 1M metric tons of material recovered.

Rapid Sorting of Scrap Metals with Solid State Device – University of Utah This project focuses on improving the separation of non-ferrous scrap metals from other non-ferrous metals using electrodynamic sorting (EDX) at high throughput and with greater purity and yield. The results will enable energy reduction of 300 trillion BTU/yr (TBtu/yr) and reduce GHG emissions by the equivalent of 15 million tons of CO2 per year.

REMADE Institute: Impact Report 2018 < 8