Recycling polyolefin materials is challenging. One waste management strategy is plastic upcycling. New work demonstrates a single-step upcycling route coupling cracking and alkylation, recycling carbon and keeping valuable resources active.

Mandy Mahoney, director of the DOE Building Technologies Office, visited PNNL in late November. One key agenda item involved meeting with staff for a discussion of effective equity and justice integration in buildings-related research.

PNNL’s ARENA test bed analyzes how electrical cables degrade in extreme environments and how nondestructive examination inspection technologies can detect and locate damage.

A PNNL innovation uses steam to recover heat from the high-temperature reactor effluent in the HTL process, substantially reducing the propensity for fouling and potentially reducing costs.

Staff at PNNL recently completed a report highlighting commercial products enabled through projects funded by the Department of Energy’s Building Technologies Office.