Yogurt containers, carpet backing, surgical masks — polypropylene plastic is ubiquitous.
It’s also notoriously difficult to recycle, said Dr. Sridhar Viamajala, a professor in The University of Toledo’s Department of Bioengineering. Less than 1% avoids the landfill.
Dr. Sridhar Viamajala, a professor in The University of Toledo’s Department of Bioengineering.
Viamajala is exploring a novel way to change that statistic with Avani Enterprizes LLC, his business with entrepreneur Mark Goren in northeast Ohio. Based on a technology to recycle polypropylene that Viamajala co-developed with collaborators at UToledo, the business recently received $200,000 through the Ohio Third Frontier Technology Validation and Start-up Fund of the Ohio Department of Development, which provides grants to companies in the state aiming to license institution-owned technologies to accelerate commercialization through activities such as market research and further prototyping.
Avani Enterprizes is one of two UToledo-developed technologies to receive such funding in 2024. Altered Gravity, based on technology that mimics partial gravity conditions for biomedical research, also was awarded $200,000.
“Plastics are a really good product,” Viamajala said. “They’re convenient. They’re easy to use. But there’s a lot of plastic that just gets thrown away. What we’re hoping with this technology is to turn that waste into value.”
As one of the least reactive forms of plastic, polypropylene tends to be an attractive option in the food and healthcare industries. While it is technically recyclable, and identifiable according to the standard recycling code as No. 5, the process is cumbersome and little used in proportion to the quantity of consumer products made with polypropylene. Polypropylene and polyethylene — used in single-use shopping and resealable bags — accounted for more than half the plastic waste managed in the United States in 2019, according to data compiled in a 2022 article in Resources, Conservation and Recycling.
Viamajala, who primarily researches bioprocessing for bioproducts and biofuel production, didn’t have this quandary on his mind when he and collaborators on the project stumbled into his novel method of recycling polypropylene. They were experimenting with waste cooking oil and thought to try dissolving plastic in the heated oil. The team was interested to learn that only polypropylene plastic dissolved, and they realized this presented a way to separate it out of a mixed waste stream.
Viamajala has been refining this dissolve-and-separate process to refine polypropylene since this discovery in 2021. The end product is a like-new polypropylene powder he plans to market to resin manufacturers and other end users.
UToledo is licensing the patent-pending technology.
The Technology Validation and Start-up Fund award will be critical toward commercializing his process, Viamajala said. It will enable him to scale up and produce the greater amounts of recycled polypropylene that manufacturers will need to effectively test his product.
“The scale at which we’re working right now is not particularly useful for people who actually want to make product out of recycled polypropylene,” he said. “They need larger quantities, and we don’t have a way of doing that in the lab.”
Avani Enterprizes also is supported by resources and funding through the National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps, in which Viamajala participated in 2023. The Innovation Corps is an entrepreneurial training program that prepares participants to take their ideas and technology beyond the laboratory and into the world. UToledo is an officially designated I-Corps Site.
Viamajala also receives ongoing support through the UToledo Business Incubator and the Manufacturing Advocacy and Growth Network (MAGNET), a nonprofit consulting group focused on growing the manufacturing industry in Northeast Ohio.
“We’re still at the beginning stages. We still have a lot to do and a long way to go,” Viamajala said of Avani Enterprizes. “But we’re excited and hopeful. We truly believe that if this technology works the way we envision, it will transform the way we think about recycling plastics.”
