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Earth Day 2024: Innovative solutions to global issues

Cleaning the planet's water, creating more-recyclable plastics and designing the batteries needed for the clean energy transition, every day is Earth Day at PME

April 22, 2024, marks the 54th annual Earth Day, a date on which 192 countries around the globe honor and recognize the need for a cleaner, more sustainable environment.

At the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, that commitment is a daily one. 

Whether ensuring clean drinking water from India to Indiana, creating more-recyclable forms of plastic, building tomorrow's batteries or finding ways quantum computing can make artificial intelligence more sustainable, here are just a few of the ways PME faculty, alumni and students are part of the global fight for a cleaner planet.

Resurgence startup ExPost awarded $8M from DOE in bid to improve battery recycling

ExPost Technology, a participant in the Polsky Center's Cohort 1 of Resurgence and which has UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering Professor Y. Shirley Meng as a scientific advisor, has been awarded $8 million by the U.S. Department of Energy to support development of an advanced mobile machinery system for pre-processing consumer electronics and batteries.

The startup’s patent-pending process – Purification-Regeneration Integrated Materials Engineering (PRIME) – removes impurities from recycled lithium battery materials to enable their reuse. The DOE grant will help support development of the first step in this: preprocessing batteries in a way that there is no fire hazard or leaking of toxic materials.

Making plastic more recyclable

Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering graduate student Sam Marsden is working on creating a more recyclable form of plastic to replace high-density polyethylene, one of the most produced plastics on the planet. It’s the plastic commonly used in milk jugs. He plans to move on from there to new materials that will replace two other large scale production plastics, low-density polyethylene and polypropylene. However, he understands that manufacturers will only adopt new materials if the price and properties are competitive.

That’s why Marsden is bolstering his PME education with science policy and international climate policy courses from UChicago’s Harris School of Public Policy. The perfect material in the lab means nothing if it doesn’t go into the market.

Finding a better path to lithium

Extracting lithium from Australian mines, Chilean brine pools or clay deposits underneath Nevada, can be a painfully slow, expensive and environmentally damaging process. But batteries powering everything from smartphones to energy storage for wind farms and solar fields demand the metallic element.

UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering Asst. Prof. Chong Liu is developing better ways to not only supply high quantities of lithium, but to do so in an environmentally friendly way.

By researching the physical and chemical processes at solid-liquid interfaces for sustainable separation, Liu has created new ways to separate dilute ions from the water. This could be used to pull lithium, rare earth elements and other scarce materials directly from water – no mining or brine evaporation needed.

Pritzker Molecular Engineering, IBM pilot program to help target pollution hot spots in India

Water-to-Cloud, a mobile sensor platform-based measurement and mapping technique developed by Pritzker Molecular Engineering Professor Supratik Guha and his team, is changing the way India targets sources of water pollution.

Once inserted into the water, these GPS enabled sensors platforms are capable of collecting real-time geo-tagged data on water quality which can then be uploaded to the cloud, providing a significant advantage over the “grab sampling” that collects samples to send to labs for analysis. The project also involves an innovative data visualization scheme, pairing years of data collected along Indian rivers by PME students and the UChicago Trust in India with maps and images of the areas. The University of Chicago Trust and IBM recently announced their collaboration to scale the initiative through the IBM Sustainability Accelerator.   

UChicago engineer driving key role in Great Lakes water transformation 

The Chicago-based Great Lakes ReNEW coalition has been awarded one of the largest climate awards in the city’s history – up to $160 million over 10 years as one of the inaugural U.S. National Science Foundation’s Regional Innovation Engines.

The award will be used in part to recycle used water, creating a clean water resource, and also to transform filtered-out waste metals into new types of batteries that help power the nation’s switch to clean energy. The initial service area will be Illinois, Wisconsin and Ohio, but over the collaborative agreement’s 10-year run, it will expand to Michigan, Minnesota and Indiana. 

    New research unites quantum engineering and artificial intelligence

    GPT-3, the initial learning model behind the popular ChatGPT chatbot, took $12 million to train. Providing the power for that massive computational task produced more than 500 tons CO2 equivalent emissions. Similar information has not been made public on GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 – the current models used to train ChatGPT – but the costs in cash and carbon are believed to be much larger.

    An interdisciplinary team including Prof. Liang Jiang and CQE IBM postdoctoral scholar Junyu Liu from the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago, UChicago graduate students Minzhao Liu and Ziyu Ye, Argonne computational scientist Yuri Alexeev, and researchers from UC Berkeley, MIT, Brandeis University and Freie Universität Berlin hope to change that.

    In a paper published in Nature Communications, the team showed how incorporating quantum computing into the classical machine-learning process can potentially help make machine learning more sustainable and efficient.

    Pivoting to engineering to help clean up the environment

    Sonia Vohra felt destined to have a career in science, but her path wasn’t always clear. While growing up in Las Vegas, she demonstrated her fascination with the natural world and loved exploring the rocks and plants of her mother’s garden. Moreover, her favorite classes in school always involved science and math. 

    She ultimately pursued an undergraduate degree in foreign service, albeit with an emphasis on science, technology, and international affairs. A marine biology research experience on a remote island in Panama made her realize that the type of scientific career she craved was more technical and environmentally-oriented. To help make that pivot, she joined the first cohort of the master’s degree program at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME), pursuing the polymer science and engineering track.