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Redesign and Modeling

plastic bottle with leaves floating around it
a desktop screen with a polymers diagram

The primary focus of the BOTTLETM Redesign Task is to create tomorrow’s plastics to be recyclable-by-design (RBD), economically viable, energy efficient, and derived from bio-based sources and today’s waste plastics. Working hand-in-hand with the Modeling Task, we are actively developing a computational pipeline to predict RBD polymers with target thermal and mechanical properties. Using this "predictive redesign" approach, our goal is to develop RBD polymers that can replace today’s non-recyclable or hard-to-recycle commodity plastics.

Our primary focus areas include the following; please contact us for more information about other activities in this task.

Prediction of RBD Polymers

We are working to build a library of millions of accessible bio/waste plastics-derived monomers, and then using high-throughput machine-learning methods to predict novel material formulations of RBD materials based on predicted performance.

Circular Biodegradable Polyhydroxyalkanoates

We are developing new chemo-catalytic routes to revolutionize the versatile polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA) polymer class, beyond the conventional PHAs derived from microbes today.

Circular Polymers with Both Full Chemical Circularity and High Performance

We are developing novel classes of RBD circular polymers based on tested design principles to defy traditional structure/property trade-offs and unify conflicting properties into a single monomer/polymer system.