U.S. Department of Energy's BOTTLE Consortium

Lending its materials science expertise and state-of-the-art facilities, NREL's advanced manufacturing researchers provide prototyping and mechanical characterization of advanced composites used in the redesign of recyclable materials.

Researcher in lab. — NREL researcher Robin Cywar purifies a catalyst with a sublimation to use in polymerizations for recyclable nylon materials. She's working with NREL's plastics group on the redesign of nylon (aka polyamide) polymers so they can be chemically recycled with more efficient and less energy-intensive processes. *Photo by Dennis Schroeder, NREL*

The Bio-Optimized Technologies to keep Thermoplastics out of Landfills and the Environment (BOTTLE™) consortium is developing new chemical upcycling strategies for today's plastics and redesigning tomorrow's plastics to be recyclable-by-design.

BOTTLE conducts high-impact research and development to deliver scalable technologies that enable cost-effective recycling, upcycling, and increased energy efficiency for plastics.

Under the BOTTLE research framework, the consortium is working to deconstruct waste plastics with catalysis and use chemical and biological transformations to upcycle the resulting intermediates to produce recyclable by design polymers.

A grey, blue, orange, and green graphic showing the workflow for BOTTLE, starting with various types of plastic waste, moving into deconstruction, and then ending in upcycling and redesign — Under the BOTTLE research framework, the consortium will work to deconstruct waste plastics with catalysis and use chemical and biological transformations to upcycle the resulting intermediates to produce recyclable by design polymers. BOTTLE will also augment new recyclable materials with bio-based and waste-based inputs. *Graphic by Elizabeth Stone, NREL*

BOTTLE is a multi-organization research consortium led by the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office and Bioenergy Technologies Office. BOTTLE is part of the Plastics Innovation Challenge, designed to accelerate innovations in energy-efficient plastics recycling technologies by 2030. Learn more about the BOTTLE consortium.

Partners

This collective effort includes national labs and academic universities. Led by NREL, the research consortium also comprises experts from Los Alamos National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Colorado State University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Montana State University, and Northwestern University. BOTTLE will also closely collaborate with the Centre for Enzyme Innovation at the University of Portsmouth in the U.K.

Publications

Characterization and Engineering of a Two-Enzyme System for Plastics Depolymerization, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (2020)

Improving Enzyme Optimum Temperature Prediction with Resampling Strategies and Ensemble Learning, Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling (2020)

Visit the BOTTLE website for a complete list of publications.

Contact

Senior Research Fellow and Group Leader

Gregg.Beckham@nrel.gov
303-384-7806