Elangeni Ana Gilbert
Constanza Ceruti is the first female high-altitude archaeologist in history. She co-led the expedition that discovered the Children of Llullaillaco at an altitude of 6,739 meters in 1999, has written more than twenty-five books and helped establish disciplines that had not previously existed. She also endured two decades of being overlooked in her own country. This is the story of a passion that began at the age of fourteen in the mountains of Córdoba and has yet to reach its limit.
Some scientists choose a subject, while others are chosen by a problem. Elangeni Ana Gilbert belongs to the second group. As soon as she joined CONICET’s research career, she directed her work toward plastic pollution and has remained focused on it ever since. Her laboratory is located at INTEC, in Santa Fe, an institute jointly run by CONICET and the National University of the Littoral, and her obsession has a fairly concrete formulation: stop treating waste as something that must be buried and start treating it as something that must be opened up.
Before plastic, there were other lines of research
The line of work that defines her today did not appear overnight. Before focusing on recycling, Gilbert worked with polybenzoxazines, a family of thermosetting materials with very strong thermal, physical and chemical performance. She also addressed a problem that often goes unnoticed: quaternary ammonium disinfectants, which are effective against viruses, bacteria and fungi but place a heavy burden on the environment once they have served their purpose.
The solution she tested there anticipated her way of thinking. Instead of looking for a more powerful product, she designed the molecule so that it would know how to break itself down: she incorporated a carbonate group that, after use, allows the surfactant to degrade into choline —an essential nutrient— and a natural alcohol. Both are biodegradable. The underlying idea, that a material should contain from the beginning the instructions for its own clean dissolution, became the thread that led her to where she is today.
The chosen adversary: bisphenol A polycarbonate
Her current target is a hard and ubiquitous plastic: bisphenol A polycarbonate, found in water containers, translucent roofing sheets and compact discs. The material contains a trap. When it degrades under natural conditions, it does not only generate microplastics: it also releases bisphenol A, an endocrine disruptor whose structure closely resembles that of estrogens and which can interfere with hormonal balance.
Gilbert often frames the problem on a geological scale. The carbon that the Earth took millions of years to bury in the form of oil was extracted and placed into circulation within a few decades, in almost every object used in daily life. Something was bound to happen. And it did.
Why the recycling we know is not enough
Mechanical recycling, the most widespread form, consists of cutting, melting and remolding. It works, but it has a limit: with every cycle, the material loses properties until it is no longer suitable for anything demanding.
The INTEC team chose a different path. It is called depolymerization and consists of chemically breaking down the macromolecule in order to recover the small components from which it was originally formed. Gilbert explains it through a domestic comparison that has become her trademark in interviews: it is like starting with a cake and recovering the flour, sugar and egg. Nuclear magnetic resonance is then used to verify that the recovered material is chemically pure, rather than merely an approximation.
Upcycling: waste that leaves with more value than it had when it entered
This is where the concept that organizes her entire project appears. Instead of using aggressive solvents, the group employs biomass-derived alcohols —methanol, propylene glycol, glycerol, erythritol, xylitol and catechol— as depolymerizing agents. The result is a series of linear or cyclic carbonates worth more than the plastic from which they were obtained.
That increase in value is known as upcycling. The recovered compounds can be used as green solvents, as precursors for the chemical, pharmaceutical, veterinary and agrochemical industries, as cosmetic ingredients and also as monomers for producing new materials: bisphenol A-free polycarbonates, non-isocyanate polyurethanes, polyhydroxyurethanes and epoxy resins. At the same time, bisphenol A is recovered under controlled conditions instead of leaking into a landfill.
The catalyst that made an expensive process viable
Chemical recycling methods already available on the market came with a difficult bill to justify: high temperatures and pressures, long reaction times, inert atmospheres, microwaves and catalysts that were either expensive or difficult to prepare.
The Santa Fe team’s contribution directly addresses that weakness. They developed an accessible and non-polluting organic catalyst that achieves complete conversion at moderate temperatures and low pressure, within short reaction times. The consequence is not only chemical but economic: low initial investment, reduced energy consumption, inexpensive raw materials and a process that does not complicate existing recycling facilities. It also enables selective sequential recycling, which is a way of avoiding the longstanding problem of incompatibility between mixed plastics.
Gilbert insists on a design principle that she repeats as a method: always seek the lowest possible energy consumption and the shortest possible processing time. That discipline is what separates an interesting paper from a transferable technology.
The night at the French Embassy
On October 1, 2025, CONICET, the Institut Français d’Argentine and TotalEnergies presented the 2025 Franco-Argentine Innovation Award. Forty-eight pilot-scale and prototype projects had been submitted and evaluated by a jury that included external specialists, among them representatives from the Argentine Petrochemical Institute. Gilbert won the junior category with “Chemical Recycling of Plastics.” The senior category went to Carla di Luca, from INTEMA —CONICET and the National University of Mar del Plata— for a hybrid device designed to remove microplastics and nanoplastics from drinking water.
She received the news by telephone, during a call from the president of CONICET. When accepting the award, she thanked the organizing institutions, INTEC, the province of Santa Fe and her research group, and offered a sentence that says a great deal about the environment in which Argentine science operates: the recognition gave them strength to continue during difficult times.
The impact extended beyond Argentina. She received inquiries from the United States, Saudi Arabia and Spain, and her work was covered in January 2026 by the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia.
The obstacle is not in the laboratory
One detail organizes her public discourse and explains why she speaks as much about citizenship as she does about catalysis. The technology works; what fails is the supply of waste. Argentina has no recovery circuit for polycarbonate, not because the material is absent, but because no one separates it. To conduct their research, the team had to accept donations: when Gilbert tried to purchase virgin polycarbonate, she was quoted as much as one hundred thousand pesos for four kilograms.
That is why her request to ordinary people is deliberately modest. Simply separating plastics from the rest of the waste is enough. When a material is not recovered, no method can treat it, and the opportunity to add value to it is lost underground.
Work that is not signed by one person alone
The project is being developed within INTEC’s Polymer Group by a team that brings together different specialties. Luisina Bressán, Santiago Vaillard, Diana Estenoz and Laureana Soria work alongside Gilbert, combining expertise in polymers and organic chemistry. Gilbert emphasizes that the achievement is collective every time a microphone is placed in front of her.
In February 2026, together with Soria, she took part in an interview marking the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, discussing why they choose to conduct research with an explicitly stated purpose.
Funding comes from the Santa Fe Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation and the National University of the Littoral.
What comes next
The project remains at laboratory scale, and the immediate objective is to demonstrate that it works at larger volumes. The next step is to expand the range of materials: PET, PLA and polyamides are already on the list.
The broader aim is for companies and cooperatives to adopt the method without major investment, generating local employment and preventing tons of plastic from reaching landfills.
When asked what motivates her, Gilbert responds with an image that summarizes the way she looks at a waste container: seeing garbage as though it were a mine filled with products. It is not an advertising metaphor. It is, literally, the technical description of what she does every day in Santa Fe.