catalaix is spearheading the development of new recycling technologies that will drive the transition to a multidimensional circular economy. Through catalysis, we enable the sustainable processing of complex waste streams and the integration of renewable energy into production processes.
The WSS research center catalaix will be dedicated to transforming the chemical industry into a circular economy.
Thousands of chemical products are produced from predominantly fossil primary resources (coal, natural gas, and crude oil) using chemical conversion processes optimized over decades, starting from a few basic chemicals and using functionalized intermediates.
Thus, end-of-life plastics are often thermally recycled, landfilled or unintentionally released into natural ecosystems.
To overcome the environmental impact created by the established linear structures of production and use, we will develop technologies to create interlinked material cycles and enable a multidimensional circular economy.
This approach will transform today’s waste into valuable raw materials of future value creation scenarios.
catalaix will develop tailor-made processes to circularly close existing material flows with different temporal and quantitative availability (blue) and to additionally interlink them with each other via the Open-Loop principle (orange). Furthermore, new, sustainably designed material cycles will be successively integrated (green).
Catalysis enables the indispensable energy- and resource-efficiency of chemical conversions and is, therefore, a key technology of this transformation.
The catalaix technologies will allow the recovery of high-quality functional chemical building blocks from a wide variety of plastics. These can be flexibly integrated into selected value paths using renewable carbon sources and renewable energy.
An interdisciplinary team of researchers from RWTH Aachen University and Forschungszentrum Jülich is working to pave the way for a sustainable chemical industry of the future.
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