Olivia Payne-Thompson

Reimagining Waste: Upcycling Waste Polymers into High Performance Gas Storage Materials

The project:

Every year, an estimated 400 million tonnes of plastic waste gets dumped into the environment of our planet. This plastic pollution doesn't just look bad, it poses a serious threat to our environment. But what if we could turn this trash into treasure? Many plastics such as polyethylene terephthalate (PET) commonly used to make bottles can be recycled but many others such as polystyrene cannot. My project will use waste plastic and upcycle it into a useful chemical feedstock for the synthesis of porous polymers. 

Imagine a sponge full of holes soaking up water. Porous polymers are molecular sponges and have holes on a nanoscale – instead of soaking up water these holes or pores can instead soak up gases. Porous polymers have a network of tiny pores that can be used to trap gases like hydrogen, methane and carbon dioxide. These gases are essential for clean energy technologies, like hydrogen fuel cells for cars, capturing methane from landfills to generate electricity and removing greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The aim of this project is to investigate the use of waste polymers for gas storage turning a waste stream into useful chemical starting material. Olivia will identify different waste polymers and develop sustainable chemical synthetic techniques to produce porous polymers from them. She will then chemically characterise these materials and test them for gas storage, capture and separation.

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