As plastic pollution continues to mount, with growing risks to ecosystems and wildlife, manufacturers are beginning to make ambitious commitments to keep new plastics out of the environment. A growing number have signed onto the U.S. Plastics Pact, which pledges to make 100 percent of plastic packaging reusable, recyclable, or compostable, and to see 50 percent of it effectively recycled or composted, by 2025.

But for companies that make large numbers of small, disposable plastics, these pocket-sized objects are a major barrier to realizing their recycling goals.

“Think about items like your toothbrush, your travel-size toothpaste tubes, your travel-size shampoo bottles,” says Alexis Hocken, a second-year PhD student in the MIT Department of Chemical Engineering. “They end up actually slipping through the cracks of current recycling infrastructure. So you might put them in your recycling bin at home, they might make it all the way to the sorting facility, but when it comes down to actually sorting them, they never make it into a recycled plastic bale at the very end of the line.”

Now, a group of five consumer products companies is working with MIT to develop a sorting process that can keep their smallest plastic products inside the recycling chain. The companies — Colgate-Palmolive, Procter & Gamble, the Estée Lauder Companies, L’Oreal, and Haleon — all manufacture a large volume of “small format” plastics, or products less than two inches long in at least two dimensions. In a collaboration with Brad Olsen, the Alexander and I. Michael Kasser (1960) Professor of Chemical Engineering; Desiree Plata, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering; the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative; and the nonprofit The Sustainability Consortium, these companies are seeking a prototype sorting technology to bring to recycling facilities for large-scale testing and commercial development.

Working in Olsen’s lab, Hocken is coming to grips with the complexity of the recycling systems involved. Material recovery facilities, or MRFs, are expected to handle products in any number of shapes, sizes, and materials, and sort them into a pure stream of glass, metal, paper, or plastic. Hocken’s first step in taking on the recycling project was to tour one of these MRFs in Portland, Maine, with Olsen and Plata.

“We could literally see plastics just falling from the conveyor belts,” she says. “Leaving that tour, I thought, my gosh! There’s so much improvement that can be made. There’s so much impact that we can have on this industry.”

From designing plastics to managing them

Hocken always knew she wanted to work in engineering. Growing up in Scottsdale, Arizona, she was able to spend time in the workplace with her father, an electrical engineer who designs biomedical devices. “Seeing him working as an engineer, and how he’s solving these really important problems, definitely sparked my interest,” she says. “When it came time to begin my undergraduate degree, it was a really easy decision to choose engineering after seeing the day-to-day that my dad was doing in his career.”

At Arizona State University, she settled on chemical engineering as a major and began working with polymers, coming up with combinations of additives for 3D plastics printing that could help fine-tune how the final products behaved. But even working with plastics every day, she rarely thought about the implications of her work for the environment.

“And then in the spring of my final year at ASU, I took a class about polymers through the lens of sustainability, and that really opened my eyes,” Hocken remembers. The class was taught by Professor Timothy Long, director of the Biodesign Center for Sustainable Macromolecular Materials and Manufacturing and a well-known expert in the field of sustainable plastics. “That first session, where he laid out all of the really scary facts surrounding the plastics crisis, got me very motivated to look more into that field.”

At MIT the next year, Hocken sought out Olsen as her advisor and made plastics sustainability her focus from the start.

“Coming to MIT was my first time venturing outside of the state of Arizona for more than a three-month period,” she says. “It’s been really fun. I love living in Cambridge and the Boston area. I love my labmates. Everyone is so supportive, whether it’s to give me advice about some science that I’m trying to figure out, or just give me a pep talk if I’m feeling a little discouraged.”

A challenge to recycle

A lot of plastics research today is devoted to creating new materials — including biodegradable ones that are easier for natural ecosystems to absorb, and highly recyclable ones that hold their properties better after being melted down and recast.

But Hocken also sees a huge need for better ways to handle the plastics we’re already making. “While biodegradable and sustainable polymers represent a very important route, and I think they should certainly be further pursued, we’re still a ways away from that being a reality universally across all plastic packaging,” she says. As long as large volumes of conventional plastic are coming out of factories, we’ll need innovative ways to stop it from piling onto the mountain of plastic pollution. In one of her projects, Hocken is trying to come up with new uses for recycled plastic that take advantage of its lost strength to produce a useful, flexible material similar to rubber.

The small-format recycling project also falls in this category. The companies supporting the project have challenged the MIT team to work with their products exactly as currently manufactured — especially because their competitors use similar packaging materials that will also need to be covered by any solution the MIT team devises.

The challenge is a large one. To kick the project off, the participating companies sent the MIT team a wide range of small-format products that need to make it through the sorting process. These include containers for lip balm, deodorant, pills, and shampoo, and disposable tools like toothbrushes and flossing picks. “A constraint, or problem I foresee, is just how variable the shapes are,” says Hocken. “A flossing pick versus a toothbrush are very different shapes.”

Nor are they all made of the same kind of plastic. Many are made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET, type 1 in the recycling label system) or high-density polyethylene (HDPE, type 2), but nearly all of the seven recycling categories are represented among the sample products. The team’s solution will have to handle them all.

Another obstacle is that the sorting process at a large MRF is already very complex and requires a heavy investment in equipment. The waste stream typically goes through a “glass breaker screen” that shatters glass and collects the shards; a series of rotating rubber stars to pull out two-dimensional objects, collecting paper and cardboard; a system of magnets and eddy currents to attract or repel different metals; and finally, a series of optical sorters that use infrared spectroscopy to identify the various types of plastics, then blow them down different chutes with jets of air. MRFs won’t be interested in adopting additional sorters unless they’re inexpensive and easy to fit into this elaborate stream.

“We’re interested in creating something that could be retrofitted into current technology and current infrastructure,” Hocken says.

Shared solutions

“Recycling is a really good example of where pre-competitive collaboration is needed,” says Jennifer Park, collective action manager at The Sustainability Consortium (TSC), who has been working with corporate stakeholders on small format recyclability and helped convene the sponsors of this project and organize their contributions. “Companies manufacturing these products recognize that they cannot shift entire systems on their own. Consistency around what is and is not recyclable is the only way to avoid confusion and drive impact at scale.

“Additionally, it is interesting that consumer packaged goods companies are sponsoring this research at MIT which is focused on MRF-level innovations. They’re investing in innovations that they hope will be adopted by the recycling industry to make progress on their own sustainability goals.”

Hocken believes that, despite the challenges, it’s well worth pursuing a technology that can keep small-format plastics from slipping through MRFs’ fingers.

“These are products that would be more recyclable if they were easier to sort,” she says. “The only thing that’s different is the size. So you can recycle both your large shampoo bottle and the small travel-size one at home, but the small one isn’t guaranteed to make it into a plastic bale at the end. If we can come up with a solution that specifically targets those while they’re still on the sorting line, they’re more likely to end up in those plastic bales at the end of the line, which can be sold to plastic reclaimers who can then use that material in new products.”

“TSC is really excited about this project and our collaboration with MIT,” adds Park. “Our project stakeholders are very dedicated to finding a solution.”

To learn more about this project, contact Christopher Noble, director of corporate engagement at the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative. More

With about 50 million tonnes of e-waste generated globally, International E-waste Day is an important day to spread the word about recycling old electronics. More than 110 organisations from 48 countries took part in the latest International E-waste Day to shine a light on e-waste and encourage the public to recycle more. E-waste is made […] More

In 2019, MIT’s Environment, Health, and Safety (EHS) Office collaborated with several research labs in the Department of Biology to determine the feasibility of recycling clean lab plastics. Based on early successes with waste isolation and plastics collection, EHS collaborated with GreenLabs Recycling, a local startup, to remove and recycle lab plastics from campus. It was a huge success.

Today, EHS spearheads the campus Lab Plastics Recycling Program, and its EHS technicians regularly gather clean lab plastics from 212 MIT labs, transferring them to GreenLabs for recycling. Since its pilot stage, the number of labs participating in the program has grown, increasing the total amount of plastic gathered and recycled. In 2020, EHS collected 170 pounds of plastic waste per week from participating labs. That increased to 250 pounds per week in 2021. In 2022, EHS collected a total of 19,000 pounds, or 280 pounds of plastic per week.

Joanna Buchthal, a research assistant with the MIT Media Lab, indicates that, prior to joining the EHS Lab Plastics Recycling Program, “our laboratory was continuously troubled by the substantial volume of plastic waste we produced and disheartened by our inability to recycle it. We frequently addressed this issue during our group meetings and explored various ways to repurpose our waste, yet we never arrived at a viable solution.”

The EHS program now provides a solution to labs facing similar challenges with plastics use. After pickup and removal, the plastics are shredded and sold as free stock for injection mold product manufacturing. Buchthal says, “My entire lab is delighted to recycle our used tip boxes and transform them into useful items for other labs!”

Recently, GreenLabs presented EHS with a three-gallon bucket that local manufacturers produced from 100 percent recycled plastic gathered from MIT labs. No fillers or additives were used in its production.

Keeping it clean

The now-growing EHS service and operation started as a pilot. In June 2019, MIT restricted which lab-generated items could be placed in single-stream recycling. MIT’s waste vendors were no longer accepting possibly contaminated waste, such as gloves, pipette tip boxes, bottles, and other plastic waste typically generated in biological research labs. The waste vendors would audit MIT’s single-stream recycling and reject items if they observed any contamination.

Facing these challenges, the EHS coordinator for biology, John Fucillo, and several EHS representatives from the department met with EHS staff to brainstorm potential recycling solutions. Ensuring the decontamination of the plastic and coordinating its removal in an efficient way were the primary challenges for the labs, says Fucillo, who shared his and lab members’ concerns about the amount of plastic being thrown away with Mitch Galanek, EHS associate director for the Radiation Protection Program. Galanek says, “I immediately recognized the frustration expressed by John and other lab contacts as an opportunity to collaborate.”

In July 2019, Galanek and a team of EHS technicians began segregating and collecting clean plastic waste from several labs within the biology department. EHS provided the labs with collection containers, and its technicians managed the waste removal over a four-month period, which produced a snapshot of the volume and type of waste generated. An audit of the waste determined that approximately 80 percent of the clean plastic waste generated was empty pipette tip boxes and conical tube racks.

Based on these data, EHS launched a lab plastics recycling pilot program in November 2019. Labs from the Department of Biology and the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research were invited to participate by recycling their clean, uncontaminated pipette tip boxes and conical tube racks. In addition to providing these labs with collection boxes and plastic liners, EHS also developed an online waste collection request tool to submit plastic pickup requests. EHS also collected the waste containers once they were full.

Assistant professor of biology Seychelle Vos joined the pilot program as soon as she started her lab in fall 2019. Vos shares that “we already use pipette tips boxes that produce minimal waste, and this program allows us to basically recycle any part of the box except for tips. Pipette boxes are a significant source of plastic waste. This program helps us to be more environmentally and climate friendly.” 

Given the increased participation in the program, EHS technician Dave Pavone says that plastic pickup is now a “regular component of our work schedules.”

Together, the EHS technicians, commonly known as “techs,” manage the pickup of nearly 300 plastic collection containers across campus. Normand Desrochers, one of the EHS techs, shares that each morning he plans his pickup route “to get the job done efficiently.” While weekly pickups are a growing part of their schedules, Desrochers notes that everyone has been “super appreciative in what we do for their labs. And what we do makes their job that much easier, being able to focus on their research.”

Barbara Karampalas, a lab operations manager within the Department of Biological Engineering, is one of many to express appreciation for the program: “We have a fairly large lab with 35 researchers, so we generate a lot of plastic waste … [and] knowing how many tip boxes we were using concerned me. I really appreciate the effort EHS has made to implement this program to help us reduce our impact on the environment.” The program also “makes people in the lab more aware of the issue of plastic waste and MIT’s commitment to reduce its impact on the environment,” says Karampalas.

Looking ahead

MIT labs continue to enthusiastically embrace the EHS Lab Plastics Recycling Program: 112 faculty across 212 labs are currently participating in the program. While only empty pipette tip boxes and conical tube racks are currently collected, EHS is exploring which lab plastics could be manufactured into products for use in the labs and repeatedly recycled. Specifically, the EHS Office is considering whether recycled plastic could be used to produce secondary containers for collecting hazardous waste and benchtop transfer containers used for collecting medical waste. As Seychelle notes, “Most plastics cannot be recycled in the current schemes due to their use in laboratory science.”

Says Fucillo, “Our hope is that this program can be expanded to include other products which could be recycled from the wet labs.” John MacFarlane, research engineer and EHS coordinator for civil and environmental engineering, echoes this sentiment: “With plastic recycling facing economic constraints, this effort by the Institute deserves to be promoted and, hopefully, expanded.”

“Having more opportunities to recycle ’biologically clean’ plastics would help us have a smaller carbon footprint,” agrees Vos. “We love this program and hope it expands further!”

MIT labs interested in participating in the EHS Lab Plastics Recycling Program can contact pipetip@mit.edu to learn more. More

The long-term aspirational goal of the Paris Agreement on climate change is to cap global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, and thereby reduce the frequency and severity of floods, droughts, wildfires, and other extreme weather events. Achieving that goal will require a massive reduction in global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions across all economic sectors. A major roadblock, however, could be the industrial sector, which accounts for roughly 25 percent of global energy- and process-related CO2 emissions — particularly within the iron and steel sector, industry’s largest emitter of CO2.Iron and steel production now relies heavily on fossil fuels (coal or natural gas) for heat, converting iron ore to iron, and making steel strong. Steelmaking could be decarbonized by a combination of several methods, including carbon capture technology, the use of low- or zero-carbon fuels, and increased use of recycled steel. Now a new study in the Journal of Cleaner Production systematically explores the viability of different iron-and-steel decarbonization strategies.Today’s strategy menu includes improving energy efficiency, switching fuels and technologies, using more scrap steel, and reducing demand. Using the MIT Economic Projection and Policy Analysis model, a multi-sector, multi-region model of the world economy, researchers at MIT, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and ExxonMobil Technology and Engineering Co. evaluate the decarbonization potential of replacing coal-based production processes with electric arc furnaces (EAF), along with either scrap steel or “direct reduced iron” (DRI), which is fueled by natural gas with carbon capture and storage (NG CCS DRI-EAF) or by hydrogen (H2 DRI-EAF).Under a global climate mitigation scenario aligned with the 1.5 C climate goal, these advanced steelmaking technologies could result in deep decarbonization of the iron and steel sector by 2050, as long as technology costs are low enough to enable large-scale deployment. Higher costs would favor the replacement of coal with electricity and natural gas, greater use of scrap steel, and reduced demand, resulting in a more-than-50-percent reduction in emissions relative to current levels. Lower technology costs would enable massive deployment of NG CCS DRI-EAF or H2 DRI-EAF, reducing emissions by up to 75 percent.Even without adoption of these advanced technologies, the iron-and-steel sector could significantly reduce its CO2 emissions intensity (how much CO2 is released per unit of production) with existing steelmaking technologies, primarily by replacing coal with gas and electricity (especially if it is generated by renewable energy sources), using more scrap steel, and implementing energy efficiency measures.“The iron and steel industry needs to combine several strategies to substantially reduce its emissions by mid-century, including an increase in recycling, but investing in cost reductions in hydrogen pathways and carbon capture and sequestration will enable even deeper emissions mitigation in the sector,” says study supervising author Sergey Paltsev, deputy director of the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy (MIT CS3) and a senior research scientist at the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI).This study was supported by MIT CS3 and ExxonMobil through its membership in MITEI. More

April 22 marks the arrival of Earth Day, which provides all of us with a good reason to think of ways to live more sustainably. For more than 20 years, the MIT Working Green Committee has helped community members do just that by encouraging the reuse and recycling of possessions.

Made up entirely of volunteers, the committee has played an important role in promoting more sustainable operations at MIT and raising awareness of the importance of conservation.

“We try to provide a place for people to learn how to live and work in a more environmentally friendly way,” says committee co-chair Rebecca Fowler, a senior administrative assistant in MIT’s Office of Sustainability.

The committee hosts regular Choose to Reuse events to give MIT’s community members a chance to donate unwanted items — or find free things that just might become prized possessions. It also provides resources to help host more sustainable events, make more sustainable purchasing decisions, and learn more about recycling.

“The recycling industry is very frustrating, so people are always asking what to do,” Fowler says. “They feel like they make the wrong decisions and just want to know how to do it. We get a lot of questions, and we’re always there to help find answers.”

Committee members say they’ve realized devoting a little time each month to things like recycling education, and hosting events can make a big difference in reducing waste. In last month’s Choose to Reuse event, more than 100 people dropped off thousands of items including clothing, housewares, and office supplies. MIT’s always-active Reuse email lists, which the committee encourages community members to join, are another great way to pass gently used items to others who can give them new life.

“The goal is to keep things out of landfills, and the Choose to Reuse event shows you immediate results,” says committee co-chair Gianna Hernandez-Figueroa, who is the assistant to the director at the MIT AgeLab. “It’s inspiring because people are excited to put things in the hands of someone who is going to repurpose it. It’s a circular event that’s really beautiful.”

Choose to Reuse events are typically on the third Thursday of every other month, although the next one — the last for the spring semester — is on Monday, April 24.

The committee is one of the only groups on campus run by support staff, whose responsibilities involve clerical duties, data processing, and library and accounting functions, among other things. It is a subcommittee of the Working Group for Support Staff.

The committee began as the Working Group on Recycling in 2000 at a time when MIT’s recycling rate was around 11 percent. By 2006, MIT had reached a 40 percent recycling rate and received a Go Green Award from the City of Cambridge. That year the committee earned an MIT Excellence Awards for its work.

Around 2011, the group started hosting Choose to Reuse events, which became an instant success.

“I really believe in the gift economy, specifically in academic settings where you have a lot of international students,” Hernandez-Figueroa says. “Plus, Boston is an expensive city!”

For a long time, the group was run by Ruth Davis, who served as MIT’s manager for recycling and materials management and retired last year. Since Davis left, others have stepped up.

“A lot of the volunteers have been around since the first Choose to Reuse event 13 years ago,” Fowler says, adding that the committee is always looking for more volunteers. “They’re all very committed to the event and to the cause.”

The organization is also a way for support staff to gain new skills. Fowler credits her experience working on the committee with improving her project management and website design abilities.

“We really emphasize capacity building,” Fowler says. “If there’s a skill a volunteer would like to develop, we can explore ways to do that through the committee. That’s something I’d like to continue: finding people’s strengths and helping them build their careers.”

Overall, Fowler says the committee aligns with MIT’s commitment to make an impact.

The group’s long history “shows a commitment to environmentalism and sustainability and a yearning to do more beyond what is in your job responsibilities,” she says. “It really shows the commitment to volunteerism of MIT’s staff members.” More