REMADE Institute devoting $19.6 million to circular economy

The West Henrietta, New York-based REMADE Institute is spending $19.6 million on researching 14 new technologies and projects to reduce greenhouse gases that cause climate change. The REMADE Institute is a division of the Sustainable Manufacturing Innovation Alliance Corp.

Created by the U.S. Department of Energy with $140 million in public and private seed money, the Institute aims to discover new ways to reuse and recycle materials. Innovators and academic researchers from Caterpillar, John Deere, Michelin, MIT, RIT, Unilever, Volvo, Yale University are among the Institute’s 167 members.

"A circular economy is imperative," said REMADE Chief Executive Officer Nabil Nasr in an October 19 press release. "It's critical in reducing industry's energy consumption and emissions in the race to net zero by 2050. At the same time, a circular approach is vital to increasing U.S. manufacturing's competitiveness, increasing the resiliency of the nation's supply chain, and creating new clean economy jobs."

The 14 supported projects involve new energy sources and other manufacturing tech that focuses on four energy-intensive material classes in manufacturing: electronic scrap, fibers, metals, and plastics and polymers.

They include efforts to improve the process of making cast iron components, remove contaminants from molten aluminum scrap, convert the midsoles of used shoes into new footwear, build machine learning tools to advance textile sorting, design recyclable multilayer flexible packaging, and increase machine learning tools to better maintain hybrid and electric vehicle batteries. Half are in the demonstration phase, meaning they are close to deployment.

Manufacturing consumes around a quarter of the energy generated in the US at a cost of approximately $150 billion. This activity, furthermore, contributes around 30 percent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions, or the single largest share in the U.S. economy. ce/jd