ReCoVR: Recovery and Circularity of Valuable Resources

by: Dr. Sissi de Beer

Hi! My name is Sissi de Beer and I am an associate professor in the Sustainable Polymer Chemistry (SPC) group supervising the team working on Functional Polymer Surfaces. You might know me as a bachelor-student mentor or as a teacher of the master courses Statistical Thermodynamics, Polymer Physics and Molecular Modeling. What you might not know is that, besides these roles, I am also the program manager of a project ReCoVR (Recovery and Circularity of Valuable Resources), in which we want to make the Dutch Chemical and Food Industry more circular.

In our current way of consuming, we extract resources from the earth, make products out of them and discard these products when they lost its function (to us). This linear way of consuming is not sustainable and eventually we will run out of resources, especially considering that the world population keeps growing. Therefore, the Netherlands, and many countries with us, have set itself the goal to become a circular economy in 2050 in which all resources can be reused. Moreover, in that year the CO2 emissions must be reduced by 95% and this has to be accompanied by strong reductions in the energy consumption.

Extracting materials for reusage from a complex waste stream is not straightforward. The molecules of interest are ‘hidden’ in low concentrations between many other molecules, and one has to fight entropy to extract them from the mixture. By bringing the mixture in contact with a material that is strongly attractive for the target molecules, one could capture these molecules. However, once they are strongly adsorbed on / in the material, it will cost a lot of energy to get them off again. Therefore, we in ReCoVR want to develop a new class of separation technologies in which we can switch the adhesion of our target molecules ON and OFF by applying an electric field. The advantage of utilizing electric fields is that it is more energy-efficient compared to temperature or pressure swings, because the energy is locally applied. Moreover, electrical energy can be made available via renewable energy sources.

To develop these new e-driven separation technologies, we need to combine the expertise from different kinds of materialsand process- scientists with knowledge of researchers that can bring the ideas to applications. Therefore, we have set up a large consortium of Dutch scientists from the University of Twente (UT), TU Delft, TU/e, Wageningen University, TNO, Saxion and many different companies (such as Avebe, Corbion, Dow etc.). All of the ReCoVR scientists from the UT are part of Chemical Science and Engineering: Mark Hempenius, Boelo Schuur, Bastian Mei, André ten Elshof, Marie-Alix Pizzoccaro and myself will work together to develop these new technologies.

We have partnered up with many companies from the Dutch Chemical and Food industry, because there we can make the largest impact. In 2018, these industries were responsible for 40% of the total Dutch energy consumption, for 31% of the total CO2 emissions in the Netherlands and for 60% of the total Dutch water consumption.

Moreover, the companies will also benefit financially, because currently 50% of their current costs are spent on separations based on pressure and temperature swing.

Together with our partners, we identified 5 target molecules on which we will focus first: proteins, (clean) water, sugar salts and carboxylic acid, carbon monoxide and flavor molecules. They are of interest to the Dutch chemical and food industry and represent different types of molecules with different properties and interactions in an electric field such that we can test the separation technology on a broad range of molecule types. Moreover, these molecules represent important societal challenges. For example, recovered proteins can be utilized in artificial meat, which will help the protein transition.

In the last months, the first PhD students have started working on ReCoVR. In the SPC group Leon Smook and Erik Postma are working with Mark Hempenius, Karin Schroën and myself of the design and synthesis of polymer coatings a switchable adhesive interaction with proteins and flavor molecules. Moreover, in the Sustainable Process Technology (SPT) group, Kim Zijderveld has started her project on the separation of carboxylic acid. She is working together with Boelo Schuur. The first interesting results are coming in and we hope to update you soon on ReCoVR again.

Figures:

[1] Electrically driven separations.

[2] Leon Smook, Mark Hempenius, Erik Postma and Kieke de Boer working on ReCoVR in the chemical lab of SPC.

[3] Photograph by Y. Singh via Pexels