Over the years, I have explored the great floating ocean gyres, miles of congealed plastic waste with sunken malignancies deep below. Animals entangled in tortured twists of our garbage that refuses biodegradation, strangled slowly or poisoned with inadvertent ingestion. Litter on our landscape, recycling mythologies, and ugliness on steroids. It is the stuff of modern society, products wrapped, containers defined by convenience, particles finding their way into our own food chain, accumulating within our own bodies.
It is the press of 7.4 billion humans on a planet built for no more than half that number, threatening to reach 10 billion by mid-century. We are focused on the effluents with the greatest killing power: greenhouse gasses. But no number of multinational Zoom calls, commitments voiced by leaders without a cogent plan, will solve that planetary disturbance, now an existential emergency. And focus on one dire ecological disaster should not relieve mankind of its responsibility for our callous tread, our leavings, our environment toxicity, in every other way.
Even the notion of recycling plastics often does not take into consideration the energy required to collect, deliver, melt and purify that waste into reusable products. And most of that energy is still generated using fossil fuels. A costly and inefficient process, to say the least. Not to mention that over 90% of our plastic waste is not even collected to be recycled. We’ve seen some efforts to move back into treated paper containers that do in fact biodegrade on their own, and there are several efforts to find solutions for plastics that do the same. But it is too little, too late.
There has been potentially one successful development, which if widely deployed shows serious promise for the planet. Still prohibitively priced, this solution will find more efficient processes in time, but focus on efficient reuse is at the core. Understanding the flaws in the recycling process, why this process is not as environmentally “clean” as we believe, is basic to understanding even the partial solutions. There is a plastic that provides a lower carbon footprint only as it is repeatedly recycled, but the research bears exploration.
Mark Wilson, writing for the April 23rd FastCompany.com, summarizes: “The average American generates 220 pounds of plastic waste each year. A vast majority of it is not recycled, even if you send it to a recycling facility. Most plastic ends up in a dump… There are all sorts of reasons for this. Some recycling facilities don’t have the technology to sort plastic correctly. And for companies, it’s actually cheaper to make ‘virgin’ plastic than to produce recycled plastic. Recycled plastic is far from perfect anyway. Generally produced by melting down old plastic, recycled plastic actually needs virgin plastic mixed in to keep its structure…
“But researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Department of Energy have been studying an enticing, new type of plastic. Called polydiketoenamine, or PDK, it’s an infinitely recyclable material. Literally 100% of it can be reclaimed and reshaped into a new plastic item as many times as a company could want.
“How could a new plastic be better than old plastic? Our traditional plastics, such as polypropylene milk jugs and nylon stockings, were developed in the 1930s to be cheap and easy to mass-produce out of byproducts from the oil industry. Through that lens, they were miraculous, and they enabled breakthroughs in consumer products, from squeeze bottles to Tupperware. The problem is that nearly 100 years later, this miracle material is completely embedded in everything we make and do—and it’s killing the planet. Realistically, we can’t eliminate plastic from the supply chain, and even if we did, that wouldn’t solve the world’s climate crisis. Even more-organic materials, such as cotton, are a drain on natural resources. Which is why many experts are making a pitch for recycling to be easier—be it through the materials themselves, or recycling facilities, or ideally, both.
“‘The idea here is that we’re designing new polymers with ease of recycling in mind,’ says Corinne Scown, staff scientist and deputy division director at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab… Plastics are chains of identical molecules called monomers, which link together into the polymers we know as plastic. Additives can enter the mix, from dyes to flame retardants to customize the material for different purposes. So when you try to recycle plastic by melting it down, all the distinct substances mix together inseparably.
“‘[Today] melting a plastic down that has all kinds of fillers . . . that stuff is all going to stay in there,’ says Scown. ‘Of course you’re going to have a degraded product at the end of that process.’ And since you have a degraded material, manufacturers add in virgin plastic to make the product stronger. Even Adidas’s cutting-edge Loop shoes, which allow the company to melt an old pair into a new pair, require virgin plastics to be added to the mix. Along the same lines, Everlane, which is trying very hard to eliminate virgin plastic, hasn’t found adequate replacements for items such as zippers and spandex. The degradation of recycled plastic is a big reason why.
“However, PDK plastics are manufactured in such a way that they can be melted down, not by heat, but by acid. This acid process is more controllable. It cleanly separates the monomers from additives. And all of those monomers can be reused in the next batch of plastic. Scown’s team actually demonstrated, using advanced simulations, that this approach could work at scale. Without heat, the process is less carbon-intensive than recycling typical plastic. And it allows more plastic, period, to be reclaimed.
“So could PDK replace all of our other plastics? Probably not, from a practical sense. To produce a virgin batch of PDK with current methods costs roughly 10 to 20 times more than regular plastics, largely because that process hasn’t been honed to scale with optimal efficiency yet, according to Scown. Also, its initial carbon footprint is actually worse due to a few specialized chemicals needed for the process. However, over time, as a product is recycled again and again, PDK makes more sense. A key metric Scown discovered is that it is cheaper to recycle PDK even just once than it is to produce a new piece of typical virgin plastic.
“‘There’s still a lot of testing to be done to understand what applications, packaging, and durable product applications this is good for, and how we might tailor new monomers in the future to get the specifications we want,’ says Scown. ‘It’s not like this is going to replace all plastics tomorrow. There will be some applications where it works and others where it doesn’t in its current form.’” There is so much we do not know, so many bad habits that will be exceptionally difficult to break, but as more people squeeze into a climate change contracted space, we must learn to respect the planet that gives us life.
I’m Peter Dekom, and the accumulation of human toxic waste that began with the industrial revolution mandates immediate and dire attention.
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