BEAUFORT, South Carolina, July 22, 2021 — GlassWRX today announced that in May 2021, The US Department of Energy’s (DoE) Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) made GlassWRX the prime awardee of $1 million in funding for its Waste into X (WiX) special topic area to advance the improvement of the physical or chemical properties of ash from waste-to-energy plants into valuable products.
Working with Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL), the GlassWRX focus is upcycling these unique ashes into Engineered Cellular Magmatic (ECM) products — novel advanced and sustainable materials with industrial applications in resilient construction, filtration, and remediation.
Rob Hust, GlassWRX Co-founder, and Chief Innovation Officer said, “With the award, we will demonstrate that ECM technology provides an economic and effective means of upcycling this waste stream into novel supplementary cementitious materials that are of particular value in the construction of resilient and sustainable concrete-based infrastructure.”
Philip Galland, GlassWRX Co-founder, and Chief Executive Officer said, “We estimate that incorporating these ashes into our existing synthesis techniques could generate an average of $10M+ in revenue per year per [waste-to-energy] plant.”
GlassWRX’s aim is to introduce industrial-scale upcycling into waste-to-energy operations across the United States, helping them move ‘beyond zero waste’ by eliminating landfilling ash byproducts of the incineration process and reducing landfill space currently taken up by non-recycled glass, which is also a primary feedstock for ECMs.