PhD Position PUR ChemCycling

Recent publicity around disproportionate plastic litter has animated societal discussion on plastic recycling and circularity, which resulted in numerous reports and initiatives on plastic waste recycling.

PUR is an important polymer for Shell, particularly the flexible PUR foams applied e.g. in mattresses. But PUR is also challenging for recyclers. Being a thermoset, PUR is not amenable to melting and reprocessing. This limits mechanical recycling to chipping to small pieces for use as filler in new products. Chemical recycling is also challenging. Hydrolysis, alcoholysis, and aminolysis processes have been developed to recover the polyol. However, the diisocyanate component is often discarded as waste or used as filler for new lower-grade materials.

We propose here to explore depolymerization approaches that allow full recovery and valorization of the PUR components, i.e. the polyols as well as the diisocyanate. We want to regenerate the diisocyanate without using toxic and hazardous phosgene.

It concerns a project financed by Shell Global Solutions, Amsterdam (Prof. dr. J.-P. Lange, part-time professor at the Univ. of Twente). The research will be carried out in close collaboration with the 'Sustainable process technology' group (Prof. dr. S.R.A. Kersten, UT) where another PhD student is involved in the integrated process elements.