On Thursday 4 May, a new session of the INMA-Impulso conference series will take place, a series of conferences that aims to bring cutting-edge research closer to society.
The next session entitled “Chemical recycling of plastics: Where we are and how to improve the recycling rates” will be given by Dr. Haritz Sardon, from POLYMAT – University of the Basque Country.
Summary: Nowadays, less than 8% of the polymers produced each year are recycled and most of them are mechanically recycled: grinding and melt‐processing, to obtain a low‐ quality material that will also rapidly ends up as a waste.[1] Besides mechanical recycling and pyrolysis, chemical recycling of plastic has emerged as a method to retain the value of the plastics as it allows to obtain high purity monomers. [2] As plastics have been traditionally designed for durability and not for recyclability, their chemical conversion to new products is nowadays considered a grand challenge and difficult to achieve.[3] In this lectura we will summarize our main activities towards the selective chemical recycling of plastics and how we are trying ot increase current recycling rates.
Haritz Sardon is associate profesor at the University of Basque Country since 2021. He graduated from the University of Basque Country in 2011 with honors before joining the group of Dr. Hedrick at IBM-¬‐Almaden Research Center as a postdoct in 2012, where he spent 2 years. In 2014 he returned to Spain with a Spanish Ministry grant and joined POLYMAT as group leader. Haritz Sardon has participated in 125 peer-reviewed publications, with more than 60 as corresponding author. The impact of his work can be measured by increasing number of citations near 1500 in 2022. He has been awarded with several awards including the ACS Macomolecules Young Invesitgator Award, Excellence of Young Researcher in Chemistry Award by the Spanish Royal Society (2021) and the Excellence of Young Researcher in Polymers Award by the Grupo Español de Polímeros (2020).
The INMA-Impulse seminars are organised by the Institute of Nanoscience and Materials of Aragon, INMA, a joint institute of the CSIC and the University of Zaragoza.
The conference will take place on Thursday 4 May at 12 noon in the Geology Lecture Hall of the Science Faculty of the University of Zaragoza.
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