Three NREL Teams Win Prestigious REMADE Awards To Remake Recycling, Manufacturing,
and More
Three NREL teams work to improve recycling, green manufacturing, and build a circular
economy. Photo by Dan Lewis, Unsplash
Recycling is broken—so say researchers and the media.
But broken may be the wrong word. Recycling is mysterious. It requires far more than
responsible citizens putting plastics in green bins. Many more products—from aluminum
soup cans to golf clubs, lithium-ion batteries to steel aerospace components—not only
get trashed after they have served their purposes but also demand high amounts of
energy to make in the first place. As of 2021, the U.S. manufacturing sector accounted
for 25% of U.S. energy consumption.
“A circular economy is critical,” said Nabil Nasr, the CEO of the REMADE Institute,
in a press release. REMADE, which was established by the U.S. Department of Energy, funds research to
increase recycling and decrease industrial energy use. “If we don’t reduce industrial
energy consumption and industrial emissions,” Nasr continued, “research shows we will
only get a little more than halfway to net-zero by 2050, about 55% of the way.” A
circular economy—where spent products do not head to landfills but get reused or transformed
into new products—is key to achieving net-zero emissions.
REMADE aims to make a circular economy happen—and soon. In December 2021, the institute
awarded $33.2 million to 23 new research projects. Three of those teams include advanced
manufacturing experts from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). According
to the REMADE Institute, these 23 projects could eliminate carbon emissions equivalent
to the annual emissions of more than 5.2 million cars.
For their three projects, NREL researchers will help create a new college-level course,
collect better data to understand barriers to recycling, and develop best practices
for recycling solar panels:
REMADE: Course on Systems Thinking for Material Management: Benefits and Tools
Project Lead: Georgia Institute of Technology
Partners: Yale University, NREL, GreenBlue, and The Aluminum Association
NREL Principal Investigator: Swaroop Atnoorkar
Swaroop Atnoorkar, a decision support analyst on NREL’s advanced manufacturing team, is helping train
the next generation of manufacturers and economists, building designers, civil engineers,
and more on how to transition to a circular economy.
“Today, there’s so much talk about decarbonizing energy systems,” Atnoorkar said.
“But at some point, we also have to manage the energy demand from manufacturing all
our materials.”
Working with the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atnoorkar and her NREL colleagues
will design a one-week module for a college-level course on how to take a systems-thinking
approach to material management. The module will introduce students to NREL’s Materials Flow through Industry tool, which models the energy consumed and greenhouse gases emitted throughout a product’s
lifespan—from raw material extraction through manufacture, use, reuse, and disposal.
To illustrate this vast, complex process, the course developers will present case
studies on commonly used metals, like aluminum, polymers (the building blocks of plastics),
packaging fibers, and electronic waste.
The course will be offered during Georgia Institute of Technology’s fall 2022 semester.
“I hope,” Atnoorkar said, “that we can get more people interested in life-cycle assessment,
sustainability, sustainable design, and a circular economy. I want more people everywhere
to have access to this knowledge and the ability to apply it to reduce the impacts
of different industries and products.”
REMADE: A Technical Evaluation Framework for Recycling Technologies
Project Lead: University of Michigan
Partners: NREL, Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, Aluminum Institute, Steel Manufacturing
Association, and Plastics Industry
NREL Principal Investigators: Liz Wachs and Mark Ruth
Today, many industries are invested in recycling. The U.S. steel industry produces
about 70% of new steel from recycled scraps. The plastics industry is starting to
make new products from recycled polymers. But there is a problem: No one is collecting
data on how recycling works or, in many cases, does not work.
Until now.
As part of a large team led by Daniel Cooper at the University of Michigan, NREL researchers
are helping chart how industries, like steel, aluminum, and plastics, as well as individual
consumers recycle and repurpose products.
“One group can’t take on this whole monster of an analysis,” said Elizabeth Wachs,
a postdoctoral researcher at NREL and one of the project’s principal investigators.
Over the next two years, the team plans to construct a recycling blueprint that lays
out how various processes work and identifies barriers that prevent the United States
from building a circular economy.
Take, for example, plastic bags and bottles. How many are getting recycled? “The issue
is no one knows the exact proportion,” Wachs said. If the number is low, the next
step is to understand why. Is the recycling process too inefficient or costly? Is
the recycled material not very useful? While NREL’s role in the project is relatively
small, the laboratory’s deep expertise in modeling how materials flow from raw material
to product to end of life will help guide the work.
“This is one of the few efforts I’ve seen where they’re trying to help get better
data for recycling products,” Wachs said. “It could have a big impact.”
REMADE: Design for Re-Solar
Project Lead: University of Pittsburgh
Partners: NREL, University of California Irvine, First Solar, Aluminum Association, Alfred
University, Sunnking Inc., Electronics Recyclers International
NREL Principal Investigators: Garvin Heath and Silvana Ovaitt
Solar energy is growing rapidly. That means far more photovoltaic (PV) solar modules—panels used to generate solar
power—will be manufactured, used, and, eventually, disposed.
“That’s why we need to design a circular economy for PV materials,” said Garvin Heath,
an analyst with NREL’s Strategic Energy Analysis Center and the Joint Institute for
Strategic Energy Analysis (JISEA). “We can recapture the glass, silicon, aluminum,
and other module materials and reuse or recycle them, which also reduces the need
to extract more raw materials. The problem is we don’t have the data to help us do
that in a smart way.”
Is it more sustainable, for example, to build more durable modules that last longer?
Or are shorter-lived, fully recyclable modules more environmentally friendly? How
could new PV technologies, like thinner panels or novel materials, help (or hurt)
efforts to build a circular economy?
Heath and a team of NREL researchers plan to answer these questions with help from
their modeling tool PV in the Circular Economy (PV_ICE). By anticipating how materials
might flow through the PV industry over the next several decades, this open-source
tool can test how different government policies, market trends, and technological
developments could impact the creation of a PV circular economy.
“Our goal,” said Silvana Ovaitt, a researcher at NREL who is helping lead the PV in
the Circular Economy project, “is to allow policymakers and industry members to make
informed decisions that could lead to a cost-effective and equitable circular economy.”
NREL also will conduct techno-economic analysis of new PV recycling facility designs
that are developed by other awardees in this project.
Learn more about NREL’s advanced manufacturing research, supply chain analysis, the Materials Flows through Industry tool, and vision for the circular economy.
