Plastics are important to our everyday lives. They make technology more affordable. Clothing more comfortable.

Plastics help protect and preserve our food and medicine. They make packages lighter and drive down energy use in transportation.

Plastics keep us safe. From helmets to prosthetics to seat belts.

And plastics are critical to breakthrough technologies like automation, advanced manufacturing, and 3D printing. These are just a few examples of the ways plastics IMPROVE our lives.

But disposal of plastics can be a problem. That's why we created the Plastics Innovation Challenge -- a new initiative, that brings together the Department of Energy, our national laboratories, and top researchers from universities and private industry across the country. Our goal is to create a continuous life cycle for plastics that will one day put an end to plastic waste.

Challenge partners are devising new ways to transform used plastic from a waste to a resource, moving beyond recycling... to upcycling; creating products with
higher market value, over and over again. We're working to make new plastics more recyclable or biodegradable at the start, and we're devising new plastic collection
technologies so that less waste ends up in landfills or leaking into our oceans and environment. With the Plastics Innovation Challenge we can imagine a day when the only problem with plastics will be figuring out how many more ways it can improve our lives.

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