Material life cycles must be reformed for a Sustainable Circular Economy (SCE) to avoid exploitation of natural resources and waste pile-up in the environment. Particularly, plastic commodity networks are creating a menace to the environment and require immediate attention. It has become crucial to determine the most promising value-chains of plastics, not only for achieving SCE but also to balance trade-offs between aspects such as sustainability, circularity, and profitability. This requires integration of information at multiple scales ranging from chemical reaction networks to process design to global life cycles. We will describe a novel framework that enables such integration to select optimal pathways and guide research toward a sustainable and circular economy of plastics. This framework brings together methods such as reaction network flux analysis to model chemical reaction networks, process synthesis and superstructure optimization for choosing optimal pathways, and life cycle assessment to reduce environmental impact without burden shifting. This framework is applied to SCE design of products such as beverage bottles and grocery sacks. The results indicate trade-offs between objectives and help identify hotspots where further work and innovation could be most beneficial.

Integrating chemical reaction networks with life cycle assessment for designing a sustainable and circular economy of plastics

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ACS Fall 2022

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