University of Nottingham · Nottingham, United Kingdom · internship · [object Object]
Are you enthusiastic about working towards a circular plastics economy? Join us as a summer intern and work on cutting-edge research in the chemical recycling of acrylic plastics to help drive sustainable innovation. We are excited to offer a fantastic opportunity for a passionate and motivated undergraduate student in engineering or scientific discipline to join a 10-week, EPSRC funded internship in plastics recycling, with a focus on pyrolysis. This opportunity is open to undergraduate students in their penultimate year of study with a keen interest in sustainable processing and net-zero technologies. Poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) is one of the most used thermoplastics of its market with 2.8Mt to be produced global by 2028. Through depolymerisation, PMMA can be chemically recycled to recover the monomer, methyl methacrylate (MMA), enabling the production of new PMMA products with a lower carbon footprint. To improve the circularity of the acrylic value chain, recent work under the Net Zero Acrylics prosperity partnership has explored methods to achieve high-purity monomer recovery. In this approach, which aims to simplify downstream purification, a secondary product stream can