by Todd Woody
If you want to build a sustainable street, neighborhood, city, or world, I have one word for you: plastics.
The facts about plastic have become part of the green
liturgy. More than 30 million tons of the stuff is dumped into the municipal
waste stream each year in the United States. Disposable water bottles have
become the Hummer of plastics—a petroleum-fueled symbol of extravagant waste,
a F-You to the planet with some 13 billion of them ending up in landfills,
littering landscapes and befouling oceans.
But the reality is that even if you pried every Evian and
Dasani bottle from every clammy sweaty hand, we’d still live in a plastic
world. It’s a component in just about every product we use, hence the
ever-expanding East Pacific Garbage Patch of non-biodegradable, indestructible
plastic that will surely move up the food chain and return to us in one form or
another.
There’s been no shortage of innovation directed at the
dilemma, from the development of biodegradable plant-based plastics to new
approaches to recycling and attempts to ban shopping bags and bottles outright.
But perhaps the most promising breakthrough emerged this
week from a Silicon Valley lab where IBM and Stanford University scientists
have been messing with the molecular composition of the polymers that form
plastic. The result: a new kind of plastic that can be made endlessly
recyclable or biodegradable.
IBM scientist Jim Hedrick in the lab at the Almaden Research Center. Photo: NASA Marshall Space Flight Center CollectionWe’ll detour here for a brief science lesson. To create plastic, you need three things—a
molecule called a monomer, a solvent, and a catalyst to get the party going.
Most plastics are made with metal oxide or hydroxide catalysts.
The problem with such catalysts, as IBM’s Chandrasekhar “Spike”
Narayan explained to me, is that they sentence plastics to but a single reincarnation.
Once you’ve turned plastic bottles into, say, carpet you can’t transform the
carpet into T-shirts. (If you really want to all the technical details—and you
have a degree in chemistry—you can read the paper Narayan and his
collaborators published Tuesday in the journal Macromolecules.)
“These metal oxides are immortal catalysts,” says Narayan,
who leads the science and technology team at IBM’s Almaden Research Center in
San Jose. That means the metal catalyst
continues to contaminate the plastic making it unsuitable for re-use. “But
if you have a catalyst that dies,” he adds, “you don’t have that issue.”
And what kind of catalysts die? Organic ones, of course. By
substituting organic catalysts for metal oxides, Narayan’s team ended up
creating polymers with new properties.
Some plastics can be designed to biodegrade while others can
be made so that they can be transformed into entirely new materials in their
second lives. For instance, all those discarded water bottles might be reborn
as body panels on electric cars or components of an iPad. And when those
products reach the end of their useful lives—which could be a matter of
months given the planned obsolescence of consumer electronics gadgets—they
can be turned into something else.
“It gives you a lot more knobs to turn—a path to polymer
architectures that are quite different and that have properties plastics
currently don’t have,” enthuses Narayan, who also works on developing smart
city technology. “I think it’s going to revolutionize synthetic chemistry.”
Here’s a video from IBM that helps to explain the new plastic breakthrough.
Now, just to be clear, Big Blue’s scientists didn’t set out
to save the world when they began their research. Rather they originally sought
to develop new polymers to be used in microelectronics.
“IBM Research partners with others to explore applications
of that expertise to problems and applications beyond information technology,
which is how we began to look at other novel applications” for the polymers,
says Sara Delekta Galligan, a company spokeswoman.
So far, this is all still being done inside the lab. But
Narayan says IBM is talking to potential partners about commercializing the
technology and expects to have a pilot project producing plastic within two
years. (And if you think the rest of the world isn’t interested in this technology,
consider that the King
Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia has already
hooked up with IBM to develop recyclable polyethylene terephthalate, PET.)
The Plastiki. Photo: Todd WoodyA few weeks ago, I had the chance to take a look at another
innovative approach to plastic when I went onboard the Plastiki. In a few
weeks, British banking heir and environmental adventurer David De Rothschild
and his crew will set sail from San Francisco on the catamaran made of plastic
and head to Sydney through the Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch, the Texas-size
mass of plastic trash that sits in the middle of the ocean.
Berthed in Sausalito, Calif., the boat’s hulls are composed of thousands of plastic bottles with the bulk of the boat made from panels of self-reinforcing polyethylene terephthalate that were produced in a process invented by the Plastiki team.
The Plastiki’s mission is to raise awareness of plastic pollution but also to be a floating demo project of how plastic can be repurposed for novel uses, like building a boat. The message: Plastic isn’t going to disappear so the challenge is to how to minimize its production through recycling and reuse.
“We had to look around and innovate,” says De Rothschild,standing on the Plastiki, next to a row of solar panels, a biodiesel-powered emergency motor and the boat’s masts made from old irrigation pipes. “We didn’t want to say plastic is the enemy. The question is, is it our inability to understand the material that’s to blame or is the material that’s to blame?”
Or maybe we’re just the problem. As my Grist colleague David Roberts has pointed out, technological innovation needs to go hand-in-hand with getting people to change their behavior.
For while IBM’s organic plastics and De Rothschild’s approach will help alleviate the poisoning of the planet by plastic, the best plastic bottle is, of course, the one you don’t buy.
Related Links:
A rich guy’s guide to saving the oceans
Ask Umbra’s 6 video tips to green take-out food
Ask Umbra on engagement rings, straws, and napkins