Polymer Solutions for the Environment Fall 2024 Workshop

Monday October 7, 2024 | 9:00 AM - 4:30 PM

CU Boulder, East Campus, SEEC Building C120

Join us at this kick-off workshop for the Polymer Solutions for the Environment initiative. This will be held at CU Boulder, on the East Campus in the SEEC Building, Room C120 on Monday October 7, 2024. This one-day workshop brings together key collaborators and stakeholders from across the region, with a focus on discussing and developing a roadmap for POSE. Talks will have a spotlight on how POSE can join and amplify the existing regional community of researchers in tackling Colorado's most pressing sustainability challenges and exploring the role of polymer science in addressing these issues. We plan to define the goals, milestones, and target research areas for POSE.

Register now for this event and we will send along more details about agenda and logistics as they are confirmed. 

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The CU Boulder New Frontiers Grant Program was launched in 2024. The program is designed to foster visionary groundbreaking, interdisciplinary research projects that have potential for high impact. This could include significant advances in knowledge, problem-solving or innovation that can build to new paradigms of understanding.

New Frontiers Grant Program

2024 Award Announcement

A central column of this program is to stimulate the development of new strengths at CU Boulder, driven by researchers thinking across disciplines and developing methods to work together to tackle complex and impactful research challenges.

Twenty-six teams submitted collaborative proposals were submitted to this program earlier this year and four projects were selected as winners of planning grants, two of which involved RASEI Fellows.

New Frontiers in Bio-Integrated Organic Computing & Low-Energy Innovative Carbon-based Manufacturing, or BIO-CLIC, led by RASEI Fellow Jeff Cameron and engaging a team across four CU Boulder departments and collaborators from NREL, will explore challenges in computational efficiency by investigating unconventional computing approaches that employ renewable sources and carbon fixation processes.

Polymers for a Sustainable Earth, or POSE, led by Wei Zhang from the Department of Chemistry and involving RASEI Fellows Dan Kaffine, Kat Knauer, Oana Luca, Seth Marder, Srinivas Parinandi, Mike Toney, and Terri Walters, brings together collaborators from six CU Boulder departments and NREL. POSE will foster a community to facilitate extramural research and funding at a scale to effectively address the issue of plastic pollution and new, sustainable methods to synthesize, reuse, and recycle polymers.

The four teams were chosen following 14 in-person pitches, where the teams outlined how their proposed work addresses important societal problems through adopting collaborative interdisciplinary approaches. The four teams will now use the next year to advance their proposals, build out the team and conduct initial investigations on how to take things forward. The teams will then compete for the single Launch Phase Grant of $200k, which will be awarded in June 2025.

Congratulations to the teams! We look forward to seeing your progress over the next year!

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Named a 2022 MacArthur Fellow for her work investigating the scale of plastic pollution and galvanizing efforts to address plastic waste, Prof. Jenna Jambeck is the Georgia Athletic Association Distinguished Professor of Environmental Engineering in the University of Georgia College of Engineering. Jambeck is internationally recognized for her research on plastic waste in the ocean and for the Marine Debris Tracker app she co-created with fellow faculty member Kyle Johnsen. She notes that being active in research helps bring current environmental engineering issues into the classroom for students.

Jenna presented the 2023 Nozik Lecture on Tuesday December 12, 2023 at 4:00 PM, which was followed by a poster reception. We had a fantastic turnout, with more than 120 interested folks attending the presentation and sticking around to discuss research in the poster session.

Stories from Sea to Source: Reducing Plastic Pollution

Plastic debris and its impacts in the environment have been widely documented, but the quantity entering the ocean from land was previously unknown. By linking worldwide data on solid waste, population density, and economic status, Dr. Jambeck made the first estimate of plastics entering our ocean globally. Cumulative global plastic production reached 8 billion metric tons in 2017. 6.4 billion metric tons has become waste that has overwhelmed some waste management systems around the world that have not been able to keep up infrastructure with economic growth. In addition, the global trade of plastic waste intended for recycling has influenced what countries can do with plastic as a recycled material with economic impacts worldwide. Shifting to where the burden of plastics is carried, the community level, Dr. Jambeck and her team created the Circularity Assessment Protocol (CAP). CAP is a rigorous, cost-effective toolkit for assessing materials management systems at the community level which has been used in 51 cities in 14 countries. Dr. Jambeck will not only discuss the methods and results of her research, but also impacts and related policies around the world. She will present an intervention framework to reduce plastic ending up in our environment while sharing stories of integrating technology and citizen science, science communication, and community-level efforts to address plastic pollution around the globe.

Biography

Dr. Jenna Jambeck is a Georgia Athletic Association Distinguished Professor in Environmental Engineering at the University of Georgia, a 2022 MacArthur Fellow, Founder of the Circularity Informatics Lab in the New Materials Institute and a National Geographic Explorer. She has been conducting research on solid waste issues for over 25 years and marine debris/plastic pollution for 22 years. Her work has been recognized by the global community and translated into policy discussions by the High-Level Panel for the Ocean, testimony to Congress, in G7 and G20 Declarations, and the United Nations Environment program. She has conducted public environmental diplomacy as an International Informational Speaker for the US Department of State since 2017. This has included multiple global programs of speaking events, meetings, presentations to governmental bodies, and media outreach around the world including Chile, Philippines, Indonesia, Japan, South Africa, Vietnam, Jordan, Israel, South Korea, India, Taiwan and China. She has won awards for her teaching and research in the College of Engineering and the UGA Creative Research Medal, as well as a Public Service and Outreach Fellowship. In 2014 she sailed across the Atlantic Ocean with 13 other women in eXXpedition to sample land and open ocean plastic and encourage women to enter STEM disciplines. In 2019 she co-led the first ever women-led expedition team for National Geographic conducting comprehensive research on plastic pollution in the Ganga River Basin. She and her research team lead the science component of the Mississippi River Plastic Pollution Initiative along with the Mayors along the Mississippi and UNEP North America. She is co-developer of the mobile app Marine Debris Tracker, a tool that continues to facilitate a growing global citizen science initiative. The app and citizen science program has documented the location of nearly eight million litter and marine debris items documented in our environment throughout the world. Follow her work on Instagram @JennaJambeck

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Monday November 13, 2023

2:00 - 3:00 PM

SEEC Building S228 (Sievers Room)

Download the Flyer

Abstract

This presentation will share three short stories focused on the make, use, and recycling of polymers with a focus on sustainability. In the first story, the development and application of organocatalyzed atom transfer radical polymerization using organic photoredox catalysts driven by visible light as well as their evolution and application toward challenging reductions including Birch reductions and PFAS remediation. In the second story, the synthesis and self-assembly of molecular bottlebrush block copolymers to photonic crystal coatings for greener structural coatings will be shared. In the third story an approach toward chemically recyclable polyolefin-like multiblock polymers with diverse mechanical properties through the construction of multiblock polymers from hard and soft oligomeric building blocks will be discussed. The multiblock polymers exhibit broad mechanical properties, spanning elastomers to plastomers to thermoplastics, while integrating a high melting transition temperature (T_m) and low glass transition temperature (T_g) making them suitable for use across diverse applications (T_m as high as 128 °C and T_g as low as -60 °C). After use, the different plastics can be combined and efficiently deconstructed back to the fundamental hard and soft building blocks for separation and repolymerization to realize a closed-loop recycling process.

Biography

Garret M. Miyake is the Dr. Robert Williams Professor of Organic Chemistry at Colorado State University. He earned his B.S. in Chemistry from Pacific University. He completed his Ph.D. studies with Eugene Chen at Colorado State University before conducting postdoctoral research with Robert Grubbs at the California Institute of Technology. He has been recently recognized with the 2021 ACS Division of Polymeric Materials: Science and Engineering Journal of Polymer Science Innovation Award and was a finalist for the 2023 Blavatnik Young Scientist Award. The Miyake group has research interests focusing on photoredox catalysis, sustainable polymers, as well as the synthesis of block copolymers that self-assemble to photonic crystals.

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