Career News
July 29, 2020

Evonik wins sustainability contest

Patrik Stenner, process engineer at Evonik, wins the Responsible Care contest of the German Chemical Industry e.V.

The chemical industry has many areas where it comes in contact with water as a precious resource. Whether in production, as a cooling agent or as a transport route. It is therefore also the responsibility of the chemical industry to protect this resource. In 2020, a contest was therefore announced which deals with this responsibility: The protection of water.

Under the slogan "sustainable use of water," Patrik Stenner, an engineer at Evonik, impressed the jury with his idea to use electrical fields to separate microplastics from wastewater and thus to make them recyclable: "Microparticles in wastewater are usually precipitated with chemicals. The intention of the project is therefore to recover microparticles, so that they can be recycled and do not remain in the wastewater," explains the engineer.

What began as an internal project has now become a sub-project of the EU-funded Horizon 2020 "Limnoplast" programme, in which interdisciplinary scientists are working on solutions to the microplastics issue.

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