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.

Research at PNNL and the University of Texas at El Paso are addressing computational challenges of thinking beyond the list and developing bioagent-agnostic signatures to assess threats.

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.