Closing the loop: EnCO2re aims to recycle carbon from waste into resource

A Europe-wide project to investigate methods to convert carbon dioxide into plastics was launched last week at the polymer industry’s major trade show, the K Fair in Düsseldorf.

The project, called EnCO₂re, currently involves a dozen research partners, including Imperial College London and Oxford University, in seven countries. The recent launch marks the point at which it is ready to work with industrial partners to scale-up processes that are currently only at laboratory scale.

There are three main routes for CO₂-to-chemical conversion, and the EnCO₂re programme has active projects in two of them – catalysis and electrochemistry – and it plans to add projects in a third route, biological conversion, during 2017. According to the programme partners, the CO₂ reuse market has the potential to grow by more than 20 times current size, and could reach a total value of 3.7 billion tonnes per year: equivalent to around a 10th of global emissions.