Noted: Green Bay is poised to become the home of the first commercial STRAP plant, which would take these kinds of plastics and make them into materials that can be used again.
This is done through a process called STRAP — which stands for solvent-targeted recovery and precipitation — developed from early work done by undergraduate students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Now, George Huber, a professor in chemical and biological engineering at UW-Madison, is leading a team at the Center for Chemical Upcycling of Waste Plastics, or CUWP, working to take STRAP from the lab to a commercial setting.
The center is funded by a $10 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy and is made up of people from UW-Madison and five other universities, a national laboratory and more than 20 industrial partners.