The Strategy for Plastics Innovation (SPI) includes consortia and centers across a variety of U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) offices that employ interdisciplinary efforts to achieve SPI goals with novel solutions and collaborative approaches. They can also serve as gateways for companies to access DOE-sponsored research at national laboratories and in academia.
Below are some of the consortia and centers that help SPI realize its goals.
Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE)
DOE’s EERE is working to build a clean energy economy that benefits all Americans. Most of EERE's new investments directly support deployments or demonstrations of technologies that show viable pathways for achieving EERE’s five programmatic priorities:
- Decarbonizing the electricity sector.
- Decarbonizing transportation across all modes: air, sea, rail, and road.
- Decarbonizing the industrial sector.
- Reducing the carbon footprint of buildings.
- Decarbonizing the agriculture sector, specifically focused on the nexus between energy and water.
BOTTLE™ Consortium
Bio-Optimized Technologies to keep Thermoplastics out of Landfills and the Environment (BOTTLE™) is a DOE multi-organization consortium focused on developing new chemical upcycling strategies for today's plastics and redesigning tomorrow's plastics to be recyclable-by-design.
REMADE Institute
In partnership with industry, academia and DOE national labs, the REMADE Institute will enable the early stage applied research and development of key industrial platform technologies that could dramatically reduce the embodied energy and carbon emissions associated with industrial-scale materials production and processing.
Center for the Upcycling of Waste Plastic (CUWP)
CUWP is a multi-university center funded by DOE to provide technical, environmental, and economic information on chemical recycling of plastic wastes. CUWP consists of six universities, over fifteen industrial partners, one national laboratory, and one industry association.
Office of Science Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRCs)
EFRCs represent a unique approach, bringing together creative, multi-disciplinary scientific teams to tackle the toughest scientific challenges preventing advances in energy technologies. These centers take full advantage of powerful new tools for characterizing, understanding, modeling, and manipulating matter from atomic to macroscopic length scales.
Institute for Cooperative Upcycling of Plastics (iCOUP)
iCOUP, led by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory, is an Energy Frontier Research Center. The scientists at iCOUP are discovering new chemical pathways to transform used plastics into a resource through recycling and upcycling.
ameslab.gov/institute-for-cooperative-upcycling-of-plastics-icoup
Center for Plastics Innovation (CPI)
CPI seizes the unique opportunity to integrate a data- and systems-driven approach with molecular-level understanding, synthesis of novel, multiscale catalytic materials, new processing schemes, and functionalization approaches toward new polymers. The goal is to reconstruct the current polymer plastic waste paradigm to positively impact the U.S. and global economy via efficient and environmentally benign pathways.