It was Spring Finals Week 2023, and Molecular Engineering undergraduate student George Rose came up to his friend Lucas Zubillaga in the dining hall.
“Lucas, I’ve been working on something that I want to run by you,” Rose recalled telling Zubillaga.
Rose had been looking at pathways to reduce methane emissions—a greenhouse gas much more potent than carbon dioxide—from landfills. Zubillaga, a double-major in Molecular Engineering and Physics, waved him off and promised they'd talk after finals.
“But I couldn’t get it out of my head. I had done research in nuclear waste, so any other chance to improve our broken waste management system felt like a blessing,” Zubillaga said.
After finals, the young men circled back, and their lives were changed for it.
The United States generates about 50 million tons of plastic waste each year. Most of it is post-consumer—products that are used and then thrown out. But a large quantity also comes from post-industrial waste—detritus from manufacturing and packaging processes that never see a consumer’s hands.
“Excess scraps and products that don’t meet quality standards often get sent to landfills or incinerated. And even when they are sent to a recycler, some of it still gets thrown out,” Zubillaga said. “We recently visited a post-industrial plastic waste recycling facility that has to dispose of over one million pounds a year.”
Rose added: “One of the main issues that makes post-industrial waste unrecyclable is that different plastic types get mixed, making mechanical recycling expensive due to sorting.”
Rose, Zubillaga and fellow Molecular Engineering major Jona van Oord founded Rise Reforming at UChicago to tackle this pressing global issue.
Actually, two pressing global issues.
“You have these two problems: the plastic waste disaster—specifically the post-industrial plastic waste disaster—and the chemical industry’s heavy reliance on fossil fuels, responsible for 5-6% of global emissions” Rose said. “We’re developing a process which kills those two birds with one stone.”
Rise Reforming’s patent-pending process turns mixed post-industrial plastic waste into carbon-negative dimethyl ether (DME). This in-demand chemical is used as an aerosol propellant and an additive in propane to reduce its emissions. Rise’s modular technology would create DME on-site at facilities that produce post-industrial plastic waste, like plastic packaging companies.
“We are going to create localized DME distribution networks. This sounds fancy, but essentially what it means is we place our container at a plastic packaging facility, and it produces DME that we then transport to a customer close by,” van Oord said. “You're eliminating both the need to truck or train DME hundreds of miles and to transport bulky plastic waste. We’re tackling a decentralized problem with a decentralized solution, optimizing transportation logistics.”
Funding success
While not missing a beat with their UChicago studies, the trio have raised $400,000 for Rise Reforming.
Their first-place win in the Department of Energy’s (DOE) EnergyTech University Prize 2024 kicked off a string of successes, including winning the 2025 FEA Startup Award, receiving funding from the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation’s College New Venture Challenge (CNVC) and The Rustandy Center for Social Sector Innovation Social New Venture Challenge (SNVC), and being selected for a prestigious climate fellowship to be announced this summer.
“After we won EnergyTech—that's when it became very real,” Zubillaga said. “Before that, Rise was a side project that we were doing out of interest. I never thought it would come to fruition like this.”
Their approach highlights two of UChicago’s great strengths—engineering and entrepreneurship, said University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering Director of Undergraduate Studies Mark Stoykovich.
“Engineering is all about translating basic science and fundamental discoveries into technologies and solutions that can impact society’s biggest challenges,” Stoykovich said. “Entrepreneurship embodies that endeavor, but due to its scale, also highlights the broad range of skills and expertise—in technology, business, finance, communications, and interpersonal, for example— that engineers require to make it possible.”
To build the company, the trio tapped resources from across UChicago, seeking out advice, help, and lab space from staff and faculty within UChicago PME and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business (Chicago Booth).
“Their passion for reducing plastic waste and creating carbon-negative chemicals highlights not only their strong moral compass, but also their remarkable ability to transform an important social issue into a viable, profitable venture,” said Deputy Dean for MBA and Masters Programs Starr Marcello, who has mentored Rose, Zubillaga, and van Oord through the CNVC and SNVC entrepreneurship classes.
The project was further honed through UChicago PME’s Engineering Design capstone course, a program all Molecular Engineering majors complete in their last year that matches students with industry mentors to turn engineering ideas into real-world products and companies.
“Rise Reforming’s undergraduate-led entrepreneurship serves as a powerful and inspiring example of translating technical innovation into real-world impact,” said UChicago PME Laboratory Director for Molecular Engineering Xiaoying Liu, one of the capstone course instructors. “And it strongly resonates with our educational mission at UChicago PME as an engineering school.”
Taking the Bull by the Horns
When looking for a sounding board for technical issues, some students might turn to their peers or a trusted faculty member. The Rise Reforming team cold-emailed a program director of the Department of Energy Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E).
Jack Lewnard, whose term at ARPA-E ended in late 2024, said he tries to respond to most student inquiries “out of politeness.” But he found himself so impressed by the UChicago undergraduates and their plans that he’s been working with them as an advisor for a year and a half.
“They’ve taken the bull by the horns. They’ve been very proactive in reaching out to people, in getting people to agree to help them. I think they have an interesting approach to both the science and the business,” Lewnard said. “They've been fearless about jumping in and doing something new.”
The team plans to stay in Chicago, continuing UChicago’s long tradition of contributing to the local economy. They’ve already signed agreements with a local plastic waste producer to handle some of their waste and a conditional purchase agreement with a local DME user. Plus, Chicago’s clean tech startup scene is growing rapidly.
“Chicago is a great place to be because we're really close to a lot of potential customers; it’s a highly industrial part of the nation—not to mention the rent is probably around half of what it is at other clean tech hubs like Boston or San Francisco,” Rose said. “And I like the approach that people take to entrepreneurship here as well. It's more of a techno-economic analysis-focused approach.”
After they receive their diplomas at Convocation this Saturday, Zubillaga and Rose will be working full-time on Rise Reforming. The team will be moving into an incubator after graduation to finish their proof of concept, raising a seed round soon after. van Oord will be pulling double duty, serving as Chief Operating Officer while completing his senior year, as the trio bring smart engineering and entrepreneurship from UChicago to the world.
Editors Note: This story originally appeared on UChicago's Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) website.