2019 ISRI Annual Report

ISRI.ORG 23 2019 Annual Report Impact in a Year of Change In a REMADE project with the University of Miami and American Forest & Paper Association, ISRI is working to identify factors that affect the quality of single-stream recycling by materials recovery facilities, evaluate emerging technologies for reducing contamination in single-stream recycling, and develop best practices for single-stream MRFs. ISRI partnered with the ReCell Center, which is focused on research and development on electric-vehicle lithium-ion battery design, reuse, and recycling . In collaboration with several other organizations, ISRI is involved in demonstrations of separate scalable identification and tracking systems for electric-vehicle lithium-ion batteries and for portable lithium-ion batteries to maximize their lifespan and ensure safe, responsible recycling at their end of life. Through the DOE-supported Reducing Embodied- Energy and Decreasing Emissions (REMADE) Institute, ISRI is partnering with Northwestern and Yale Universities to develop a generalizable, dynamic systems modeling framework to assess the profitability and environmental benefits of U.S. fiber recycling systems under different economic, technological, and scrap market assumptions. ISRI is partnering with the University of Massachusetts Lowell and Sunnking in another REMADE project to (1) design a process to separate plastics and metals derived from used electronics , (2) identify anti-solvents for separating different plastics and also flame retardants from the plastics, and (3) evaluate the techno-economic feasibility of scaling-up the designed process. This project is expected to be complete at the end of 2020. ISRI is partnering with Yale in a REMADE project to develop a material-flow model for the supply chains of the four REMADE materials—metals, plastics, fibers, and fibers—including key recycling metrics.