We're bridging the gap between traditional academic discovery of a new idea and proving that it works fundamentally, but then also actually testing it on materials that consumers are buying.”
Northwestern chemist Will Dichtel wins Green Chemistry award
Tommy Baker | July 6, 2026
Dichtel, the Robert L. Letsinger Professor of Chemistry in Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and a faculty affiliate of the Paula M. Trienens Institute for Sustainability and Energy, shares the award with Alaaeddin Alsbaiee of BASF Corporation. The award recognizes both teams’ development of a solid-state recycling platform that upcycles polyurethane foams and elastomers into new, high-value materials using green catalytic processes.
Established in 1996, the Green Chemistry Challenge Awards recognize innovative technologies that reduce or eliminate hazardous substances, improve energy and resource efficiency, and advance more sustainable manufacturing practices. Since the program's inception, award-winning technologies have collectively eliminated hundreds of millions of pounds of hazardous chemicals, saved billions of gallons of water, and prevented billions of pounds of carbon dioxide emissions. The award will be presented August 26 at the ACS Fall Meeting in Chicago.
Polyurethanes are among the world's most widely used plastics, found in products ranging from furniture cushions and mattresses to insulation, footwear, and automotive components. However, unlike plastics that have recycle codes, most polyurethanes are manufactured into a permanent shape and cannot be recycled. Large amounts of polyurethanes end up in landfills at the end of their useful lives.
"We're taking a class of plastics that the industry considers completely unrecyclable. They know there's a massive end-of-life problem for these materials, and we're developing new ways to actually recycle them," said Dichtel.
To address this challenge, Dichtel and collaborators at BASF developed a short-loop recycling process that enables polyurethane waste to be directly transformed into new foams, elastomers and composite materials. Rather than breaking the material apart into its original ingredients, the catalysts repeatedly rearrange the chemical bonds within the plastic, allowing a discarded product to be reshaped into a new object, or blended with other polyurethanes to make a different product class.
"Imagine a catalyst just walking around," said Dichtel. "Instead of changing the material, it takes a bond that's here and moves it over here. Think about that happening billions and billions of times—you can take a plastic that was cast as one shape and reshape it into a new object."
The project was developed through a close collaboration with BASF, allowing the researchers to test new catalytic approaches on commercially relevant polyurethane materials while gaining insight into the practical challenges of large-scale manufacturing. By combining Northwestern's fundamental research expertise with BASF's industrial experience, the team worked to develop solutions that could ultimately be adopted in real-world products.
The NU-BASF partnership was initially funded by the United States Department of Energy through the REMADE Institute.
"We're bridging the gap between traditional academic discovery of a new idea and proving that it works fundamentally, but then also actually testing it on materials that consumers are buying," Dichtel said.
The Green Chemistry Challenge Award also recognizes the collaborative effort behind the research, in this case honoring 18 members of the Northwestern and BASF teams who have contributed to the technology over the last several years.
"It's not a professor sitting in a room thinking of these ideas. It's graduate students and postdocs here at Northwestern and really serious professional scientists at BASF who made this happen."