Debalina Sengupta, Clint Thompson and Jackie deGroot listen to their peers discuss advanced recycling.
The University of Houston’s Energy Transition Institute partnered with the Center for Energy Studies at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy to jointly host the Annual Sustainability Summit, highlighting global challenges in plastics and e-waste.
The summit, titled “Innovations and Collaborations in Circularity and Supply Chain Resilience,” was a sold-out event that invited 360 registrants to the Baker Institute on April 22, less than a month after UH and Rice officially joined forces in March to bring more eyes to the global plastics crisis.
The summit explored sustainability’s three core dimensions — environment, economy and society — and put a spotlight on research, policy insights and emerging technologies shaping the energy and sustainability landscape.
“As two universities working together in the Houston ecosystem, I think this partnership is the biggest show of how we should be thinking of the world in the future.”
—Debalina Sengupta, associate vice president and COO of the Energy Transition Institute, University of Houston
This multidisciplinary approach is the cornerstone of UH Energy, the University of Houston’s signature energy initiative. The Energy Transition Institute operates as a key pillar of this initiative, which integrates research, education, industry engagement and innovation to address the most pressing challenges of the 21st century. By leveraging expertise from across the enterprise — including engineering, science, business, law and public policy — UH is working to develop reliable, affordable, resilient and sustainable energy solutions that start in Houston but can scale across the world.
“We are the energy capital of the world,” said Debalina Sengupta, associate vice president and COO of UH-ETI. “As two universities working together in the Houston ecosystem, I think this partnership is the biggest show of how we should be thinking of the world in the future.”
The summit hosted seven discussions with topics centered around sustainability. Two of those discussions featured UH experts: Sengupta and Professor Jian Shi, Associate Professor in the UH Cullen College of Engineering.
How UH is Helping Repurpose Electronics
Shi discussed his work around e-waste and its hidden potential, as well as its impact on the environment and the economy in a panel moderated by Rachel Meidl, deputy director of CES, that featured Lillie Stockseth, behavior change project manager at the Houston Zoo; Natalie Messer Betts, vice president of sustainability and material systems at Recycling Materials Association; and Tilsa Oré Mónago, fellow in energy and market design at the Baker Institute.
“We need better policies that benefit all the stakeholders’ interests. We simply don’t have a lot of collection infrastructure in place,” Shi said. “Most people don’t know where to drop off an old laptop. We need to address that infrastructure problem first, then we need to raise awareness to increase activation.”
Stockseth revealed early in the panel that the Houston Zoo has been working alongside UH and Harris County to make e-waste recycling more accessible around the region. Her goal is to prevent habitat destruction due to mining for rare materials but said the best approach to encourage recycling is to make people aware of the benefits.
“Whether you’re trying to get people involved in e-waste recycling for the sake of a circular economy, high level sustainability goals, habitat preservation or to keep bayous clean of lithium, everybody wins,” she said. “The message that appeals to your audience most at that time is the most effective.”
Shi recently published research that echoes Stockseth’s sentiment from an economic point of view. His paper offers a strategic framework to reclaim the gold, lithium and cobalt buried in discarded electronics, which would keep rare materials circulating within the U.S. instead of ending up in foreign landfills, supporting both national and economic security priorities.
“Of course, recycling e-waste can give us all these environmental benefits, but I think in order for us to really build that industry, it also has to make economic sense,” Shi said. “We need good policies, a good amount of awareness and good infrastructure to convert that sleeping stock into something we can utilize.”
UH Leads Conversation in Plastics Recycling
Meanwhile Sengupta, who recently co-authored a white paper that calls for a unified approach to recycling plastics, participated in a live adjudication moderated by Jackie deGroot, nonresident fellow at the Baker Institute, and featured Clint Thompson, chief commercial officer at Nexus Circular; Aaron Doughty, independent consultant for energy and sustainability; and Marco Castaldi, co-chair of the Recycling Science Council.
The discussion focused on the evolution and sustainability of advanced recycling, which converts plastics into useful intermediates like ethylene and propylene that can then be used to create new polymers.
The discussion emphasized the importance of policy support, consumer education and technological advancements to scale up advanced recycling and address the growing plastic waste issue.
“I think advanced recycling has the potential for a larger scale system than what mechanical recycling offers us at this current point,” said Sengupta, referring to the process of recovering plastic waste through physical methods, such as sorting, washing, grinding and melting. “One of our major findings was the lack of advanced recycling and the choice of different technologies that would qualify in the APR scheme and looking at EPR as a waste reduction strategy.”
UH, Rice Forge the Way Forward
This summit was the first of many events following UH-ETI’s partnership with CES, which aims to align research, technology innovation and cross-sector engagement to address systemic challenges across materials, energy and industrial systems.
The goal is to position Houston and the Gulf Coast as a global leader in circular carbon and resource innovation.
In addition to the panel discussions, the summit invited students from both universities to showcase their own research with topics ranging from using freeze-dried microalgal biomass to improve soil quality and plant growth to using compatibilizer additives for mechanical recycling of immiscible plastic blends.
“The importance of this Summit lies in a fundamental reality: sustainability is complex. There are no one-size-fits-all solutions, only interconnected systems that must be navigated and optimized across competing priorities,” Meidl said. “That’s exactly why the Rice-UH partnership is so critical. By aligning research, policy insight and industrial expertise, we can turn circularity and resilience from concepts into operational, investable systems at a scale that matters.”