This report covers the critical focus areas the REMADE Institute is addressing to advance our nation in sustainable manufacturing and highlights the accomplishments of the institute and our members.
The REMADE Institute is proud of the collaborative effort of our members and would like to thank all who made it possible.
REMADE is proud to announce that we’ve reached our newest milestone—150 members!
We want to extend our warmest welcome to our new members and also want to extend our deepest gratitude to all of those who have joined the Institute over the years, including many who have been with us since the beginning.
REMADE is proud to work with all of you as we develop technologies capable of addressing industry's impact on climate change, reducing energy consumption, decreasing greenhouse gas emissions, conserving resources, increasing U.S. manufacturing competitiveness, and creating clean economy jobs.
Together, we can accelerate the nation's transition to a Circular Economy.
ROCHESTER, N.Y. — August 24, 2022 — The REMADE Institute, a 154-member public-private partnership established by the United States Department of Energy (DOE) with an initial investment of $140 million, today announced a new technology license involving a technological innovation capable of recovering precious metals from used electronics more easily and cost-effectively.
The innovation, developed with REMADE support, is part of a research and development project first funded by the Institute in 2020. The R&D project, “Low-Concentration Metal Recovery from Complex Streams Using Gas-Assisted Microflow Solvent Extraction (GAME),” is still in progress and is led by Wencai Zhang, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Department of Mining and Minerals Engineering at Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering, and Aaron Noble, Ph.D., an associate professor in the same department. Phinix, LLC, is the industry partner on the project. REMADE’s tech team oversees the project, ensuring it meets the Institute's and DOE's technological milestones.
“A new technology license is a great accomplishment, and we believe it will be incredibly valuable to U.S.-based electronics recycling companies.”
The REMADE Institute is pleased to welcome Remacol Inc. as a new Industry Member to our ever growing membership base.
Remacol Incorporated is a privately held company in Washington state. The company's primary focus is on Lignin and Cellulose Nanocrystals. They bring innovations in the production of core products (cellulose nanocrystallite (CNC) and lignin) from plant materials.
The REMADE Institute is pleased to welcome the Brunswick Corporation as a new Industry Member to our ever growing membership base.
Brunswick Corporation is the world’s leader in recreational boats, marine engines and marine parts and accessories, and one of the longest continually publicly-traded companies on the New York Stock Exchange.
Brunswick understands the impact its business has on the world and the opportunities we have to lead the way in sustainable, responsible practices.
The REMADE Institute is pleased to welcome Barnes Group Inc. as a new Industry Member to our ever growing membership base.
Barnes Group Inc. (NYSE: B) pioneers technologies to help change the world. Leveraging world-class manufacturing capabilities and market-leading engineering, they develop advanced processes, automation solutions and applied technologies for industries ranging from medical and personal care to mobility, packaging and aerospace. Customers benefit from their integrated hardware and software capabilities focused on improving the processing, control, service and sustainability of engineered plastics, factory automation technologies and precision components.
The REMADE Institute is pleased to welcome Gordon Aluminum Industries Inc. as a new Industry Member to our ever growing membership base.
Located in central Wisconsin, Gordon Aluminum is a dependable, single source for aluminum extrusion, custom fabrication, bending, assembly and finishing. Their diversification allows them to provide customers with value-driven solutions that help make their supply chain more efficient and cost-effective.
Gordon Aluminum is a forward-thinking, sustainable supplier of aluminum extrusions and components with a collaborative team of employees that constantly pushes forward to develop new ways to better serve each customer’s needs and ensure success.
Paper is one of the most recycled materials globally. Producing paper from recycled fibers recovers 30%-70% of embodied energy and reduces fresh water significantly in comparison with using virgin wood. This helps alleviate environmental impact and promotes sustainability within industry. However, paper recycling is a complex process that involves collection, sorting, fiber washing, cleaning to remove contaminants, and remanufacturing fibers into paper of different quality. Through this two-day online Advanced Fibers Recycling Bootcamp, participants will strengthen their awareness of the overall paper recycling process and technologies.
Registration is now open for the REMADE Institute’s 2022 Tech Summit! This members-only event will take place virtually from 12:30 pm to 5 pm ET on Wednesday and Thursday, May 118-19.
Get the latest updates on our innovative technology portfolio; hear more from your fellow members during insightful panel discussions and project showcase sessions; and learn more about our upcoming funding opportunities.
Join us for this highly informative, member-exclusive event!
The REMADE Institute is pleased to welcome ReJoule Inc. as a new Industry Member to our ever growing membership base.
ReJoule’s holds the mantra, “Maximizing the Value of Every Battery”. Everyday more batteries are powering our cars and homes enabling a cleaner energy future. ReJoule is there to make them more reliable, safer, and longer-lasting. They make sustainable transport and energy even more sustainable.
ReJoule utilizes established characterization techniques to quickly and accurately grade batteries. These techniques are called electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) and hybrid pulse power characterization (HPPC). These are diagnostic tests that unlock battery parameters that track degradation (e.g. loss in active lithium, SEI layer growth, etc).
The REMADE Institute is pleased to welcome Schnitzer Steel Industries as a new Member to our growing membership base.
Since their founding in 1906, Schnitzer has grown into a global leader in metals recycling through a combination of organic investments and acquisitions which provide state-of-the-art processing, manufacturing and information technologies. Today, Schnitzer operates 102 recycling facilities, including seven deep water ports – on both U.S. coasts and in Hawaii and Puerto Rico – which enable efficient delivery of processed scrap metals to steel mills and foundries around the world.
Schnitzer is a global leader in the collection, processing, and sale of the world's most recycled product: steel. Through their integrated operating platform, they process scrap metal and manufacture finished steel products from their own scrap metal. Properly handled, scrap metal is a continuous and valuable resource that can be re-melted and reshaped into new products countless times while providing significant economic and environmental benefits as compared to virgin materials. They also recycle metals ranging from iron and steel to aluminum, copper, lead, stainless steel and zinc.
The REMADE Institute is pleased to welcome Proto Manufacturing as a new Member to our growing membership base.
Since its founding in 1967, Proto Mfg. has been developing cutting-edge instrumentation for the characterization of materials. Product lines include various x-ray diffraction (XRD) instruments: residual stress and retained austenite measurement systems, powder diffractometers, Laue single-crystal orientation systems, and high-resolution diffractometers. In addition, we supply x-ray tubes and custom equipment to meet customers’ unique needs. For over 30 years, Proto Mfg. have been providing effective measurement systems for laboratory, factory, and field environments. Trained specialists also offer measurement services in our American and Canadian laboratory locations, which are ISO/IEC 17025:2017 accredited.
The REMADE Institute is pleased to welcome Battelle Memorial Institute as a new Member to our growing membership base.
Battelle provides comprehensive scientific solutions to companies and government agencies across multiple markets, including: Health, industry, National Security, Infrastructure, and Environment. With a team of over 40,000 highly skilled and trained employees, they manage nine national laboratories in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Energy and Department of Homeland Security.
The food industry is a vital part of the U.S. economy, and the food packaging market has experienced double-digit growth in recent years. The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the critical role that the food and packaging supply chain plays to ensure essential products continue reaching millions of consumers safely.
At the same time, food packaging containers account for 30% of waste generation in the U.S., and less than 50% of this volume is currently recycled. That recycling rate falls to under 30%[1] for the types of multilayer food packaging targeted in this REMADE R&D project, including the brick-shaped cartons commonly used for a wide range of liquid foods including milk, juices, soups, sauces, and more. This multilayered packaging retains the product in a commercially sterile state for months or even years, but is difficult to recycle.
The R&D project team is working to develop a process by which these multilayer materials can be replaced by a single mono-material packaging solution produced from up to 100% recycled PET (the same plastic that water bottles are made from), which can be recycled back into the same or comparable products with minimal reprocessing, handling, and transportation. The team is validating the performance of materials and manufacturing process at industrial scale and conducting a recycling pilot with the support of a material recycling facility (MRF) to quantify recycling rates and recycled material quality.
Following the successful completion of the project, implementation is anticipated through the Ohio Safe Food & Packaging Initiative.
[1] Source: PET Material Flows in the US (MM lbs) - Postconsumer PET Container Recycling Activity Report by NAPCOR and APR.
Today, the U.S. only recycles 8.4 percent of the plastic waste that is collected. Although new advanced mechanical and chemical recycling technologies hold the promise of a closed-loop circular economy for plastics in the near-term, the anticipated economic, environmental, and societal benefits of a closed loop system are still not well understood.
With a focus on polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and olefin plastics, which together comprise nearly two thirds of U.S plastic production, the R&D project team successfully built a model that evaluated how the manufacturing and recycling processes in a plastics circular economy can be configured to minimize energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. The model predicted that it is possible to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 24% compared to current recycling approaches.
In the next phase of the R&D project, the team is expanding the model to include material flow analyses, material transportation and logistics analyses, recycling process modeling, energy and environmental life cycle assessments, techno-economic analyses, and regional / national economic studies.
The model will be validated with a case study in the state of Michigan in close collaboration with the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE). The modeling simulation will be developed using CHEMCAD and UniSim, allowing results to be disseminated broadly to accelerate the U.S. transition a circular economy for PET and Olefin polymers. Doing so would save material, energy, and emissions associated with plastic recycling and close the annual gap of more than 1 billion pounds between the current U.S. supply and projected 2025 demand for recycled PET (rPET) for use in bottles.
The embodied energy of vehicles is increasing as energy‐intensive materials such as aluminum auto body sheet (ABS) are used to deliver improved performance. Unfortunately, the current system cannot effectively recycle automotive aluminum at end-of life (EOL) because the shredded aluminum is frequently contaminated with steel rivets, steel alloys, and copper wiring. As a result, 90% of auto shred aluminum is exported and downcycled.
In addition, the shift to electric vehicles (EVs) will increase the demand for high‐quality aluminum ABS and advanced high strength steels (AHSS) for light weighting, double the amount of copper wire (thereby increasing end-of-life contamination), and potentially reduce demand for vehicle castings that could utilize the lower quality scrap.
To address these end-of-life issues upfront, the R&D project team is developing a new design for recycling tool that considers how vehicle design, recycling system infrastructure, and sheet manufacturing process decisions impact factors such as EOL recycled content, closed and open‐loop recycling rates, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and primary feedstock consumption and energy demand under different scenarios from 2020‐2050 (e.g. rapid deployment of EVs).
The tool will be integrated into the Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) GREET model, which is already widely used by the car industry to quantify environmental impacts. Once developed and implemented, this tool has the potential to reduce the consumption of primary steel and aluminum by 2.35 million metric tons (MMT) and 0.19 MMT, respectively.
Electronics are an integral part of every industry sector from healthcare to aerospace, automotive, consumer electronics, and more. There is tremendous value in developing ways to reuse printed circuit board assemblies (PCBs) in remanufactured products, resulting in reduced cost and environmental impact.
During remanufacturing, a previously used, worn, or non-functional product or part is returned to “like-new” or “better-than-new” condition from both a quality and performance perspective. One factor that limits remanufacturing is the inability to detect solder joint and interconnect failures in printed circuit boards (PCBs). Although these defects, which account for 13% of all electronics failures, can be easily and effectively repaired once they have been identified, detecting these types of failures on used electronics is costly because inspections are performed manually.
To reduce this barrier and increase the number of PCBs that can be remanufactured, the R&D project team evaluated several inspection methods to determine whether they successfully identified defects and could be cost-effectively implemented. The team is currently building an inspection system and decision support tool that will be validated at one of the team member’s remanufacturing facilities.
Once implemented, this technology is expected to increase PCB remanufacturing by 25-35% and reduce embodied energy by 30%.
The REMADE Institute is pleased to welcome Dynamic Lifecycle Innovations as a new Member to our growing membership base.
Dynamic Lifecycle Innovations is a full-service electronics and materials lifecycle management corporation specializing in IT asset disposition, electronics recycling, legislative compliance, product refurbishment, remarketing and resale, materials recovery, and data security. We create customized service packages designed to safeguard our customers’ sensitive data and protect the environment from e-waste and other pollutants.
The REMADE Institute is pleased to welcome Secat, Inc as a new Member to our growing membership base.
Secat is a metallurgical research laboratory specializing in aluminum product and process technologies.
Secat has technical and marketing capabilities to serve various aluminum product sectors including: automotive, marine, aerospace, packaging, building & construction, electrical, and recycling. Secat assists companies with materials testing, failure analysis, alloy development, and the enhancement of processes and properties related to casting, forging, extrusion, rolling of plate sheet & foil, powder metallurgy, and foams & composites.
