Eliminating End-of-life Plastics requires technological advances to maximize recycling and recovery, behavioral understanding to influence consumer attitude, and economic approaches to incentivize the extension of product life. Each alternative involves trade-offs in its social acceptability, economic feasibility, environmental sustainability, and circularity. The overall goal of this multidisciplinary project is to develop holistic and systematic methods and tools for assessment, design, and innovation toward Sustainable and Circular E3P (SCE3P). To accomplish this, the project team will conduct synergistic research in polymer chemistry, reaction engineering, and molecular simulation to determine the properties of depolymerization and valorization processes under practical conditions of contamination; process design to model the cost and physical flows of current and emerging technologies; supply network modeling to determine the effects on the wider chemical industry; behavioral studies to discern and influence the role of consumers; life cycle and circularity assessment to estimate environmental effects across global value chains. The resulting framework will consider the entire plastics life cycle, including thousands of combinations of alternatives at each step to select the “best” pathway. Our focal context will be the food services industry.
Dr. Sintov’s focus of this project is on consumer behavior and decision-making, in particular advancing knowledge on behavioral spillover by examining the effects of decision sequencing throughout the lifecycle of products and their packaging and accounting for multiple (vs. pairwise) spillovers.
