Science Friday - The Past And Future Of Plastics Tech. April 30, 2021, Part 1

Episode Date: April 30, 2021

The Future Of Plastics Plastics do a lot of good. They’re sturdy, they’re clean, and the COVID-19 pandemic has really highlighted their benefits, with personal protective equipment like disposable gloves and masks. But its durability is also its biggest problem. We’ve all seen photos of piles of plastic trash washed up on beaches, and animals surrounded by plastic bags and straws. Those materials will take decades, if not centuries, to break down. Even as it breaks apart, it can become millions of microplastic particles that cause their own problems. So how do we tackle one of the biggest environmental crises of our time? Scientists are working on both ends of the plastic life cycle to come up with solutions. Breaking down the plastic that’s already out there, and coming up with alternative materials that could be better for the planet. Guest host John Dankosky interviews two scientists doing great work on this topic: Dr. Francesca Kerton, professor of chemistry at Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John’s, Canada, works on alternative polymers that could replace some plastics. Her latest research is focused on a polymer made from fishery waste. She’s joined by  Dr. Gregg Beckham, senior research fellow at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, who works on enzymes that can break down plastics to its smaller building blocks for easier recycling. Ask An Expert: What The Heck Are Microplastics? Despite their small-sounding name, microplastics are a big deal. That’s because these tiny pieces of plastic debris can wind up just about anywhere. In fact, we know microplastics are in our oceans and our soil, and they can also get into what we eat and what we drink. Since this is a relatively new problem, we don’t have a lot of long-term research on their effects. But investigations studying microplastics have already influenced legislation, and prompted innovations for combating plastic pollution. Dr. Imogen Napper, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Plymouth in the United Kingdom, studied microbeads in facial scrubs. Her work led to a microbead ban in the United States and other countries. She says we need to rethink how we use plastic in our everyday lives for the health of the planet. “It’s a fantastic material that’s so durable,” Napper tells Science Friday. “But we don’t need to make so many single-use applications that could last a lifetime,” especially when these products are only used briefly. Napper and host John Dankosky talk about all the strange places microplastics have been found, and what role individual consumers play in combating an issue that can seem insurmountable. This conversation was held in front of a live Zoom audience. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankosky. Ira Flato is on vacation. A little later this hour, we're going to dive into the state of plastics. In some ways, plastic is a miracle material, but it's also caused one of the biggest environmental crises of our time. We'll talk to some scientists who are working on tackling the problems in our plastic world. But first, I'll look at the COVID-19 pandemic in India. This is the second wave of the pandemic for the country, and it's hitting hard. India had a record low number of cases back in February, but the numbers increased starting in mid-March, and yesterday the country reported nearly 380,000 new cases in just one day. And the number of deaths reached nearly 4,000. Amy Nordrum is here to give us an update on that story and other

science headlines of the week. She's an editor at the MIT Technology Review. Welcome back to the show, Amy. Thank you, John. Good to be here. So what is the current state of the pandemic in India right now? Well, as you say, the situation is really bad there. The pandemic is worse there now than it's ever been. They're in the middle of this terrible second wave of infections. They've reported more than 300,000 new cases every single day this week. And the reality is estimated to be far worse than even those official accounts show. So why has the second wave hit the country so hard? What big issues are they facing? Well, you might think India would be a little bit ahead of the game here because they are one of the world's largest vaccine manufacturers. But there's more than a billion people who live there. And it only roughly 10% have even received one dose at this point. So while they vaccinated a lot of people already, it's just going to take a lot longer to reach the entire population. And in the meantime, the government has relaxed some public health measures that were in place early on in the pandemic. So there's no nationwide lockdown in effect there like there was early on in the pandemic. And there's no federal social distancing requirements. So some states are implementing those,

but it's been kind of piecemeal. And in the meantime, there's been a lot of political rallies and religious gatherings and other weddings and events happening. Let's get back to these vaccines. Of course, India is a big manufacturer. Why are they able to manufacture vaccines for their own people? I've been talking with Krishna Uday Kumar and Andrea Taylor of Duke's Global Health Institute about the vaccine situation and that question. And they've said that India's government was slow to support its own domestic vaccine suppliers.

So it didn't place advance orders like the U.S. And some other countries did. And it didn't give those suppliers any kind of financial support to help them ramp up production early on so that they'd be ready to not just supply India, but also all the other countries that don't have any vaccine-making capabilities. I hope we hear some better news from India coming up soon. Let's move to another story. And, you know, each week, it seems, on our news roundup, we're hearing more news coming out of the Biden administration about plans to shift to green energy. Last week, there was an international climate summit, and there's been a lot of money put toward

wind power projects. Now this week, the White House is talking about putting money toward power grid improvements. Tell us more. That's right. On Tuesday, the Biden administration announced billions of dollars in federal loans and support to upgrade the electric grid. And a lot of that money will go towards supporting high voltage transmission lines, which carry electricity over long distances. And these are the kinds of lines that you need to connect areas that have a lot of wind and solar power available to areas that have less of that or that have large populations. And they already have a few projects in mind for this new money. A group called the Americans for a clean energy grid has named more than 20 projects that they said were ready to go and could be helped by this new

funding. And most of those are interstate lines. Several would carry electricity from wind farm projects in Wyoming to areas like the Pacific Northwest and even Las Vegas where there's just a lot of electricity demand. Amy, what can you tell us about some of the projects that this new funding might go toward? Well, one project would connect Texas's grid to a converter station in Mississippi and from there to the rest of the south. And if you remember, the fact that the Texas grid wasn't connected to the rest of the U.S. was a major problem earlier this year when a really bad winter storm hit and threatened to take down the entire grid there. And there's also some projects that would connect offshore wind farms in the northeast that the Biden administration has made it very clear that it supports and bring

that power to communities on land. And then there's one project that would actually run under Lake Erie and connect Ontario to the power grid operator that serves the Great Lakes region here in the U.S. So these lines are very important, but they're not always easy to cite. There are a lot of stumbling blocks. Tell us about what stumbling blocks they face. Yeah, that's right. So a lot of times people don't want these lines running through their towns or communities, and so they might protest against them. And Biden's plan tries to address that by saying that the government can use existing rights of way for highways and railroads as much as possible to work around that. But even if all 22 of these projects were completed, that still wouldn't actually be enough transmission capacity to make the grid capable of being 100% renewable. So there would need to be more projects in addition to these.

So a lot more money spent, a lot more projects have to go online just to make sure we can meet some of these very ambitious goals that the administration has. Exactly. Yeah. Right now the Biden administration is making a lot of promises and plans. And of course, there's always challenges to getting these things done. So during the pandemic, we've heard a lot about clinical trials. And now the FDA is cracking down on how clinical trials data is reported.

What's happening here? Yeah, that's right. So there's always all kinds of trials going on to test all different kinds of medicines against different diseases. And for a few years now that Food and Drug Administration has had this rule that any company or university that runs a clinical trial has to post the results to a free public website called clinical trials.gov. And the idea there is to make these trial results transparent so that anybody can look them up and be able to share information between researchers so that everybody can see what worked and what didn't and what kind of side effects might have occurred for different treatments. So trial sponsors are supposed to post these results within a year of when their trial ends. But ever since the rule is put into place, a lot of companies, and especially universities, have basically ignored it and never posted the results or only done it after very long delays.

And the FDA has always kind of just let this happen and never enforced the rule. But this week, the FDA has been its first ever noticed to a company that was three years late in reporting its trial results for a drug that was supposed to treat kidney cancer. I'm a little bit confused, though, because it seems like such a an important thing to do. And we reported on our program more than a year ago about this. Why a crackdown now? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, and they only sent this letter to one company called Acceleron, while actually there's many more, and especially universities and even federal agencies that are also behind on reporting and that haven't yet been notified. So some have been wondering if this is a sign that the Biden administration is going to be taking this reporting rule much more clearly.

And if this is just the first of many warnings and instances to come. Is there anything in particular that Acceleron is alleged to have done that would have prompted this notice at this time? Not that we know of. Right now, it just kind of seems like a one-off, but it would be, I think, surprising if this were the only letter that they ever issued. So, you know, I think that we could probably expect to see, you know, more action on trying to get trial sponsors to share their results, as they should have been doing the entire time. All right. Well, speaking of crackdowns, you brought us a story here about a group of researchers who've set off a conversation in the old. open software community Linux, and it's kind of a fascinating story. Tell us about it. Yes,

there's this very well-known open-source software called Linux. It's an operating system that can be used to do lots of different things. And like other open-source projects, it's maintained by a community of volunteers who write new code for it and check each other's code and try to improve the software over time. But lately, some security researchers from the University of Minnesota have been in hot water with this community because they wanted to test how vulnerable open-source projects like this are to hackers. So in the name of security research, they submitted some code to the project that patched a minor issue, but also introduced new code that could theoretically later be used by the same group to carry out an attack. And they were able to get these patches approved.

So they upset this larger community because they say that they were trying to do something that would in a long term help. Yeah, exactly. And the fake patches they sent never actually got incorporated into the software because the researchers told volunteers about their tax. and they withdrew the fake patches and sent them the right ones instead. And they published a paper on their study, so they were public about it and wanted to just use that as proof that these projects are vulnerable to these kinds of attacks. But the whole method did not go over well with the volunteers, and they've effectively banned anyone from the University of Minnesota for contributing to the project for the time.

And they're going back through and reverting all of the university's earlier contributions. Well, there's two different things that are interesting here to me. One is this is kind of a conundrum of how you go about testing, testing security, if not this way. And the second thing is this sort of blanket ban of all the email addresses from the University of Minnesota. That seems like an odd way to crack down. Yeah, I mean, the researchers say, or originally said, they've apologized since, but they said that this is an ethical and acceptable way to do security research, which often does try to, you know, involve trying to identify new vulnerabilities and draw attention to them. But the volunteers

argue it's a violation of the community's principles of trust. The project shouldn't be experimented on in that way. Okay, so your final story looks at something that could be really exciting here. A new type of earthquake early warning system that's going live in Washington State. How does it work? That's right. The system's called Shake Alert. And basically, when an earthquake happens, there are these seismic waves that travel out through the ground. And this system uses seismometers placed all over the state to detect the very first waves that occur. And those first waves don't cause any damage. They're not the waves we feel. But they can be used to generate an early warning alert for anybody in the area that a few seconds ahead of when the more damaging waves actually hit. And that's

exactly what this new shake alert system that's coming to Washington State next week is designed to do. So this is pretty exciting. I read that Google's looking to develop something that's similar, but using smartphones. Right. So Google is separately working on its own system that would rely on the motion sensors in smartphones to detect earthquakes and alert people that they were about to hit. And if that works, that would be a lot faster and cheaper to set up than the shake alert system, which did require installing hundreds of seismometers. The Google system isn't yet available. It's still being tested in a couple of countries.

Okay, so there's the standard seismometers we have, and then there's this new system that's being worked on in Washington State. And then Google has an entirely new way of doing things over smartphones. Do we have any sense whether one of these ways of learning about earthquakes early is going to be more adopted or better than the other? I think both could do great things in terms of, of giving people advanced warning. I think, you know, if they're roughly accurate

and they both exist in the world, that's a great thing. And they both have their limitations. You know, the closer the yard at epicenter, the less warning time you're going to get, for example, and Google's system wouldn't be as good at detecting offshore earthquakes because there aren't people holding smartphones out there. Oh, that's right. Offshore where a lot of earthquakes happen and you could be worried about tsunamis,

you're not going to have any readings because there's nobody out there in the middle of the ocean. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, I think these will be improved. on what we've had in the past, which is an earthquake just hits and you don't have any time to, you know, take cover or pull your car over to the side of the road. And so a few seconds notice could really make a big difference here, but it's not as if this would be a perfect system either way. When it comes to cell phones reading early earthquake signals, it seems like a great technology, but I guess I worry that anything from tremors from fracking to, I don't know, a really vigorous

aerobics class could make it seem as though there's tremors going to the phone and maybe set off a false alarm, are there worries? Yeah, that has actually happened in a few cases. I was reading about Google system where even a bad thunderstorm might cause the alert to go off. But that is why they're testing it and they're trying to kind of see if they can distinguish the difference between, you know, an early warning earthquake wave and then other rumbles and vibrations that happen in our daily lives. Amy Nordrum is an editor at the MIT Technology review. Thanks so much, Amy, for bringing us these stories. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. After the break, they may sound small, but microplastics are a big deal.

A dive into what they mean for our bodies and our planet. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankowski. Today we're doing a special hour about plastics. A little later this hour, we'll talk about the future of plastics, new alternatives, and ways to break down what already exists. But first, despite their small, sounding name, microplastics are a big deal. That's because these tiny pieces of plastic debris can wind up just about anywhere. In fact, we know microplastics are in our oceans and in our soil, but they can also get into what we eat and what we drink. And since this is a relatively new problem, we don't have a lot of long-term research on them. But there are some great scientists doing work on microplastics and their

effect on the environment. Their work has influenced legislation and the creation of innovations for combating plastic pollution. And one of those researchers is joining me now. Dr. Imogen Napper is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Plymouth in the United Kingdom. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for being here. Thank you so much for inviting me. And just a note that this segment was recorded in front of a live Zoom audience. You can learn how you can join a future behind-the-scenes radio recording on our website, science friday.com slash live stream. All right, to start, let's get a definition here. What exactly is a Microplastic? So a microplastic is defined by the size. So very small plastic that's less than five millimeters in length. So imagine that like the size or smaller of your fingernail. And then you can

categorize it into primary and secondary. So primary microplastic has been made to be that size. So think of microbeads in facial scrubs. And secondary microplastic has degraded off a larger item. They think of a plastic bag breaking into tiny bits. So some are made, some are made to be bigger things that are broken down. Maybe you can talk about that process of larger pieces of plastic breaking down. Give us an example of what sort of thing happens and the types of microplastics we find from this type of degradation. So gosh, plastic is really everywhere.

So if you look around the room that you're in right now, I'm wearing plastic clothes, I've got a plastic sofa, plastic carpet, plastic pen talking for your plastic computer or elements of. And the way that it breaks down eventually, if it's in the natural environment, it can get tumbled around by the ocean. But the main way it gets broken down is by sunlight and photo-oxysation. Its most basic form, plastic is carbon and hydrogens put together in a long line called a polymer. And what sunlight does is it introduces an oxygen molecule, which is a double bond, which breaks the carbon and hydrogens, basically in half. And that's, that's what fragments plastic. And that's how we can find so many bits in the ocean.

So does this mean that every piece of plastic anywhere is eventually going to become a microplastic? You can say that every piece of microplastic in the ocean is going to keep getting smaller and smaller, potentially into nanoplastics and larger items that think of a carrier bag if it goes into the ocean and it's going to break down into microplastics. So it just keeps getting smaller and smaller and smaller. But it's also been predicted that all of the plastic has ever been made is still on the planet today unless it's been burnt. So it hasn't gone anywhere else. It's just gotten so small. We don't necessarily see it, but it's everywhere. And it's so small, actually, that as I said in the introduction, we could be eating these. We could be drinking them. What kind of

effect does that have on our body? There's a lot of new research being developed about the risks to our health and to animals health and our ocean health. They're getting so small that it's been found in our drinking water, in beer, in salt. You name it, it's everywhere. And even as we're talking right now, plastic fibres will be coming off my plastic jumper and I'll probably be breathing them in every now and then. So it's a cause of concern of how much there is in our day-to-day life. but nothing we should panic about our health at the moment. And there's still so much we need to discover. There's some very clever researchers building on that research at the moment.

You said breathing them in? Breathing them in. So we're doing research that looks at plastics in the air. So I've got a friend who looks at when we're wearing clothes and we're moving about because most of our clothes are made out of plastic, such as polyester or acrylic. Tiny fibres are coming off them all the time. We actually did some research on Mount Everest, and an expedition team went out there and took snow samples all the way from Everest Base Camp to just below the summit at a place called Mount Everest balcony. And in every single snow sample, we found plastic.

And most of them were microfibers that we predict to come off clothes. And there was a correlation where more people were, we found more plastic. So in Everest Base Camp, we found around 70 micropastics per litre. of snow, but even just below the summit at the balcony, we are finding 10 microplastics piece of snow. And the polymer type was similar to what they would be wearing. So we've predicted that these fibers had come off the climbers that were climbing up the mountain.

So for the most part, and that's, it's very scary to think that you're finding microplastics at the top of Mount Everest, where not that many people have been, although more than perhaps in the past. You're finding fibers that have probably been left from the clothing. of the hikers who were there as opposed to fibers that maybe have drifted across a continent and have ended up on Mount Everest because of getting into the atmosphere. It's probably a mixture of both. But finding the correlation that where more people were, it's almost like a trail of red

crumbs. Where the people are, you're going to find more plastic. I want to get back to this health effect. The state of California is getting ready to issue the world's first guidelines for microplastics in drinking water. they're trying to decide what a safe threshold is for microplastic content, understanding that there will be some microplastic content probably in any water. What do you think of this idea? And are we ready to start to set health guidelines, water safety levels, essentially, in terms of

microplastics? I think we still don't know the full health implications yet. And the fact that we could be drinking them, they're in our food, and we're breathing in the whole time, by limiting it in our water supply, I will still be going to get them in other sources anyway. The thing that's most important to me is just minimizing the amount of waste we create. And if we can minimize the amount of waste and completely change how we view plastic, it's actually an incredible material. And when I first started my PhD, I wrongly thought that it was evil and it was the devil. And the only way that we could fix the problem was to just get rid of it.

And I was wrong and completely wrong. it's a fantastic material that's changed our lives. But where the problem is is that we're making it for single use applications that then we just throw away very quickly. And it's such a persistent, durable material that's designed to last a lifetime. Nancy has a question here about our individual impact. Nancy, go ahead. Hi, thanks.

Yeah, I was wondering, how can one person make a difference in reducing microplastics when this is such a large-scale problem. Yeah, I completely agree, Nancy. And my research has shown that the smallest change can have the biggest input. So even washing your clothes only when you need to will stop hundreds of thousands of fibers potentially entering the ocean. We also did some research on microbeads and facial scrubs. No one knew how many microbeads could be in one bottle.

These microbeads were tiny plastic particles that were put into facial scrubs to act as exfolients, so to get the dead skin cells off. So for my first research project that I ever did, I got lots of facial scubs that looks slightly crazy going to the supermarkets and getting thirsty at a time. So I think they just assumed I wanted to be really clean. And I spent crazy hours in the lab extracting them

to see how many they were. Originally, I thought maybe 100 or 200. But all we found was the opposite. We found three million tiny microbeads could be in one bottle of facial scrub. You want to squirt on your hand when you're washing your face, they could be 10,000. Now these would go down the drain,

similar to washing our clothes, through the sewage treatment works potentially and then into our oceans. But the most exciting part was it showed me how consumers can have a really powerful voice. So people could go to the supermarket or the shop and they could look at the ingredients list of the facial scrub and if it contained polyethylene or a plastic,

you don't buy it. You get a natural alternative instead, which is the same price or cheaper. Then industry started to listen to the consumer because it was coming very unpopular and Han on Hart, I actually used to use these products. I never considered that they would have plastic in my facial scrub. And then industry started to listen

and they started to remove their microbeads voluntarily. And then from our research, it influenced governments around the world to ban microbeads in the US, in the UK, in Canada, in India throughout the world. But the main thing it showed me is how consumers can have a really powerful voice and it all started with the consumer. So never underestimate how small differences can make a huge impact. By not buying that one bottle of microbeed facial scub, you're stopping three million tiny microplastics entering the ocean.

Are there any other products like that right now that are on the market that you're looking at where people could stop buying them and it really could help to save a lot of plastic going into our water system? So luckily, microbeads have gone, for the most part. We still need to keep checking to check that industries and using them. But for the most part, we're all happy. But my bugbear is glitter because most of glitter is plastic. And you see it so much in cosmetics. So if I could have a next thing to remove, it would be glitter. Interesting.

Okay, good to know. Judith from Baltimore has a question about some of the different types of plastic. Hi there, Judith. Go ahead. Hi, thank you. is there any possibility there are any good plastics that break down into harmless elements? We actually did some research looking at biodegradable and compostable plastics. And it was the longest experiment that I've ever done.

So it was a three-year experiment. I took samples every nine months. And I tested conventional carry bags that had no biodegradable properties, biodegradable bags and compostable bags. And I put them in the soil. I put them in the sea and left them hanging outside. The ones that were outside, completely fragmented into tiny bits with that photo-oxidisation, that sunlight we discussed.

So they just went to microplastics, which you could argue as worse, because how did you clean up something that's that small? However, the biodegradable bags that were in the soil and in the ocean could still hold a full bag of shopping after three years. The compostable bag was still there in the soil, but did disappear in the ocean within three months. what it went into, we're not sure. But it showed me that it's complicated. Just because something's labelled as biodegradable and compostable

doesn't mean it's necessarily going to break down in all environments. So we need to be really careful about greenwashing. I'm not saying that's not a solution in the future, but in a really specific area they could work. So if you imagine a football stadium where you might have some cups that are biodegradable and they could be all removed and go to an industrial composter where it's getting their heat and the moisture that they need, that would be fantastic. So we just need to make sure with industry and with consumers that we're all singing from the same

hym sheets and it's completely clear and completely standardized. So we understand how these products are going to behave. And as you say, even in the ocean, if it breaks down entirely, you don't know what it's breaking down into. Exactly. And we're hoping to do some more research into that. Christy from Evergreen, Colorado has a question. Hi there, Christy. Go ahead.

Hi, good morning. I was wondering what the role is of plastic manufacturers. There are so many manufacturing facilities coming online. What role do they have? So the plastic manufacturers are the key of making all of these wonderful products that we have in our day-to-day life. And it all starts with something called nerdels, which are pre-production pellets.

So they have the tiny bits of plastic which are transported around the world. You find a lot of them on beaches, and if a cargo ship ever loses some cargo and they end up spilling in the ocean. But what the plastic manufacturers can do is discuss with industry and discuss with whoever needs these items. Do we really need them? And is there a better alternative? And what I'm really keen to do is for every item that's brought to the table that's

going to be made, we think of its circular economy. So we think, okay, this water bottle is going to be made. What's going to happen to it when it's at its end of the table? life. Can it be recycled? Can it be reused again? What's the environmental impacts? So we need to start thinking about the environmental impacts right from when a product is being made. And that starts with the manufacturers and the industry that's making them. But you said this earlier, you really have begun to think that there are a lot of good that plastics do. The more you've learned about them, you understand their role in our society. It's not like you're saying,

let's ban all plastic. Definitely. Plastic has really shown its worth. We need to to treat it like gold. My mum still has jumpers from when she was my age that are plastic that she still wears, but she repairs them, still has old tubberware. My nana still has plastic items when she was my age. It's a fantastic material that's so durable, but we don't need to make so many single-use applications such as plates and coffee cups that could last a lifetime, but we use them for a massive moments. So it's really just changing the way that we think and we value plastic in our day-to-day life. I'm John Dankosky, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. I'm talking with Dr. Imaging Napper, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Plymouth in the UK. She studies

microplastics. Why did you get so interested in this in the first place? So I grew up in a small seaside town called Cleveland, which is in the southwest of the UK. And it's a an amazing old town and we look over the estuary onto our neighbouring country Wales. But growing up, I never remember there being any plastic on the beach. And the thought of even doing a beach clean, I wouldn't even fathom. I just didn't think about that when I was younger. But now I go back to the same beaches and there's beach cleans. I see plastic pollution.

I think, oh my goodness, this has happened in my lifetime. So what's it going to be like in another 30 or so years? and it upset me, but also it was a big cause of curiosity. And I was able to mold that curiosity into research where I'm investigating. I've best been called a plastic detective so I can look at the different sources and face of plastic to have my piece of the pie of solution. And that, I assume, helps you not get bogged down in just the enormity of this problem. It is something that if you think about it can make you pretty depressed, honestly. I think we've all probably taken a walk down the park or down our streets or to the beach.

We've seen plastic pollution and it's obsessing because it's our natural environment. But it's important to remember the amount of good that's happening. I even just walking my dog today saw someone pick up a bottle that wasn't theirs and put it in the bin. So we just need to remember that it's our shared environment. We share the ocean. We share the air. We share our planets. So we need to treat it as shared and protect it like that.

and I like what you talked about too, thinking about even the things that we wear that are made largely of plastic that we can repair and reuse over time. I think over the course of the last couple decades, we've come to think of recycling as putting a plastic bottle into a bin and somebody else is going to take care of it. But what you seem to be talking about is really thinking about,

do I need that thing, and then recycling it if you can as many times as possible so that you're not having to put end up being as often. Exactly. We're using it for another purpose. I have old tin cans I use as putting my pencils in, for example. So upcycling is a great way of giving something a new lease of life. But if your clothes break and guilty is charged, I used to do this. If my jeans break or a jumper break, sometimes it's just cheaper or just easier to go to the shop and just buy a new pair. Actually, what we should be doing is learning how to fix them, like in the good old days, to make our closed our longer. Well, that's all the time we have. I'd like to thank everyone for so many great

questions, but I'd also like to thank my guest, Dr. Imogen Napper, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Plymouth in the UK. Thank you so much for your time and your expertise. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much, everyone. We have to take a break. And when we come back, we're going to talk about what the future might look like in our plastic world. We'll be right back after the short break. This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankoski, and we're continuing our special hour about plastics. We know that plastics can do a lot of good. They're sturdy, they're clean, and the pandemic has really put their benefits to the forefront with personal protective equipment like disposable gloves and masks. But its sturdiness is also its biggest problem.

We've seen all the photos, piles of plastic trash washed up on beaches, sea creatures swimming along plastic bags and straws. That plastic is going to take decades or even centuries to break down, and as we've heard, as it breaks apart, it can become millions of tiny microplastic particles that cause their own problems. So how do we tackle one of the biggest environmental crises of our time? Scientists are working on both ends of the plastic lifecycle to help us tackle this issue, breaking down the plastic that's already out there, and coming up with alternative materials that could be better for our planet. Joining me today are two scientists doing great work on this topic. Dr. Francesca Curtin is Professor of Chemistry at Memorial University of the

Newfoundland in St. John's in Canada. Welcome to Science Friday. Hello. And Dr. Greg Beckham is Senior Research Fellow at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado. Welcome to the program. Thanks for being here. Thank you, John. So Francesca, I'd like to start with you and get an idea of the work you do. It's my understanding that you're part of a team that made a plastic alternative from something that I wouldn't have thought of, fishery waste. How did this idea start? So in Newfoundland, we're surrounded by the oceans and I got involved in a conversation with the Newfoundland Aquaculture Industry Association. And they told me that they were having a problem with the amount of waste they were being produced at fish processing plants, so particularly salmon. And so we all

know that salmon's good in our diets because it has healthy oils in it. And so the waste material that's produced, which is about 50% of the caught fish, has a lot of oil in it too. So I knew about research in the US and elsewhere, where they were using vegetable oils to produce plastic, so soybean oil and things like that. So I thought, well, the structures of these oils are fairly similar. Could we use this waste material to produce a new plastic? And then would that plastic be more amenable to decompose or biodegrade in an ocean environment because that's where the fish oil came from originally. So we came up with a method for isolating the fish oil that I always make this analogy that it's like making a fish smoothie. So you take the waste fish,

you blend it up and then you let the oil settle out on the top. And then we take that oil and in three easy steps, we can get to a plastic. The first question that most people listening to this will probably ask is, does it stink? Like, does it smell like fish? No, it doesn't smell like fish. So at first, the oil that we get, it has a slightly fishy odor. So if anybody takes cod liver oil supplements or any other nutritional supplements that have a fishy base, it has that slightly fishy smell. But as soon as we get through these steps, the smell goes away and the plastic does not stink.

What type of plastics could this possibly replace? So the material we made is known as a non-isocyanate polyurethane. And these have got applications in things like clothing and soles of shoes, but also materials such as you can foam them and make them into the seats in cars and all sorts of things. We're still studying the exact properties of our material at the moment. some of our research has been slowed down a little bit by COVID. And so we can stretch this material. So it's quite a little bit like saran wrap, the first materials we've made. And so it would be interesting if we could kind of go kind of full circle where we're using a byproduct of a food industry.

Could we use it for packaging of food or even within the warehouses for wrapping up materials there? Yeah, that kind of saran wrap, too, wrap up things. is one of the biggest uses of plastics in our food stream. And that would be really interesting. Do you know yet how long it takes to break down? So we've done some studies using enzymes, which are biological catalysts. So the ones we're using are called lipases. And they're traditionally used to break down fats.

And so where our oil is a fat, that's why they've been good for doing this digestion. And in our studies, we've also seen molds and bacteria. growing on the surface of our fish plastic, and we've done gene sequencing on them, and they are bacteria and fungi that are commonly present in fresh water and in soils. And so we're kind of looking into this more, and the short answer is we don't know exactly how long

in the open environment it will take, but I think they would definitely decompose more quickly things like polypropylene and PET, just because of how they're made, and our initial studies. Well, since you're talking about enzymes, let's turn to Greg in the work that you're doing, which is really about breaking down plastics with enzymes.

Tell us about your work. So in 2016, a group from Japan reported a very exciting finding. They isolated a single bacterium from the soil outside of a Japanese bottle recycling plant where they were recycling polyethylene terraviolet or PET. This is a plastic commonly found, of course, in single-use beverage bottles. but also in carpet as well as in clothing.

And so it's a very abundant material that, as Francesca was mentioning, you know, will last a very long time when it gets out into the environment. And in collaboration with the University of Portsmouth, our group at NREL worked on essentially trying to solve the structure of the two enzymes that this bacterium was identified to secrete to break down PET in the soil. And our goal was to understand, you know, PET has only been around for about half a century or so in large circulation. And how is nature essentially adapting to the presence of these synthetic polymers out in the

biosphere? And while our initial goal here was really focused on understanding that sort of evolution and how nature was adapting to these synthetic plastics, what that got us to thinking about was can we use enzymes in a recycling process, you know, to be able to break down, say, PET plastic into its building blocks. And then we could either use those to go back into, you know, PET applications, or we could, you know, do further chemistries or biological transformations on those to maybe even make something of higher value towards this idea of upcycling.

And moreover, we've also looked at, you know, what would a process like this look like at very large scale? So what would the economics look like relative to today's mechanical recycling infrastructure? What would the sustainability look like relative to virgin PET manufacturing? And in both cases, this predicted to be a cost-competitive potential process. But it's also predicted to be much more environmentally friendly from an energy and a greenhouse gas emissions perspective than virgin PET manufacturing. Are you looking at breaking down plastics that aren't PET? That's a great question, John.

So as part of the U.S. Department of Energy funded bottle consortium, which I lead, we are definitely looking across the spectrum of other types of plastics as well, including, as Francesca was mentioning, polyethylene, polypropylene, even things like PVC, which are typically deemed to be essentially not recyclable hardly at all. So absolutely, we're looking across the spectrum and across sort of the global consumption of plastics towards things beyond PET. Francesca, Greg talked about scalability for enzymes, and this is a really important piece of this. What about your fishery waste polymer? Do you see this as being mass deployed in some industry?

I don't think it will ever be mass deployed just because the economics of scale are already in place for these petroleum-derived materials. But what we do know is that you can produce enough fish oil worldwide from waste that can be competitive with linseed oil, castor oil, and other plant-arrived oils that are produced. on an industrial scale for other applications, such as in surfactants and things like that. But, yeah, one of the things we need to do is try and identify kind of higher value uses for these bi-derived plastics to actually make them worthwhile

and economically competitive. And if I could build onto what Francesca was mentioning, I think that I share the excitement about waste-based sort of new plastics and towards this concept of recyclable by design plastics. I think the onus is on us as a research community and an industrial community to essentially work towards both dealing with today's plastics as we just discussed, but also in the vein that Francesca is working on and we are also working towards is, can we redesign

tomorrow's plastics to be inherently more recyclable than they are today? Can we onboard bio-based inputs and waste-based inputs instead of the building blocks that we derive from fossil fuels, today. And I think when we start over with a sort of a clean slate with, say, fish oil, for example, as a feedstock or other types of waste or bio-based sources as feedstocks, non-food-based sources, I should say, as feedstocks, that changes the landscape in terms of the materials design space such that we can both think about performance, which of course we all want and need in plastics and materials that we use every day as consumers, but also in terms of the recycled ability at the end of its functional life, whether that be use in packaging for, you know,

minutes to hours or, you know, use as a wind turbine or a car part, you know, which might be in use for decades at a time. But I'm wondering, Greg, if you can build on that, though, it seems as though one of the the fallacies that we have in our mind about recycling currently is that if I take this plastic bottle and I put it in a blue bin outside my house, it goes and gets made into something wonderful somewhere else. And the fact is if the economics of that something wonderful aren't there, then it's probably not going to be made in anything else. It's going to be burned or put in a landfill. So can you talk a bit more about the economic imperative of making something that you can

actually use and sustain for many cycles, not just maybe one more cycle? That's a great question, John. So the sort of canonical example that many folks always use myself included is really the single-use beverage bottle, which is mostly PET, has other plastics in it as well, but mostly PET. When we put that into the blue recycling bin, that sometimes will be recycled and often will still go to the landfill, but when it is recovered and recycled and sent to a materials recovery facility, it will be thermally processed after being cleaned and et cetera. It will then go into lower value PET applications like clothing or carpet or other types of fibers. So it's essentially a down cycling from a inherent economic value of that PET bottle to something lower in value that will ultimately after its second life still end up in landfill or worse in the environment. And so again, I think the onus is on us to work towards developing new technologies that could incentivize reclamation of not only that PET bottle,

but other types of plastics, both that are mechanically recyclable today, but perhaps that are not, whether it's not a large economic incentive to do so. And then beyond that, to Francescas one earlier, for example, there are lots of plastics out there that we take for granted that cannot be recycled at all today, like foams in the seat cushion that cannot be recycled easily today through the current mechanical recycling infrastructure. And so I think there's opportunities both to develop new technologies that will incentivize today's plastics that are recyclable,

but perhaps are not at a sufficient scale, as well as those that are not recyclable at all. I'm John Dankosky, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. As we continue our conversation about plastics, Francesca, I want to ask you about this idea of biodegradable plastic packaging. A lot of us are now seeing that come into the food stream more regularly. You know, you get the biodegradable plastic fork, and you feel like, okay, well, this is something that if I throw in the garbage, it's going to break down, but there's a whole lot of problems with that, in that if you don't dispose of it properly,

it probably is not going to break down. Can you talk us through this problem a little bit, the limitations of biodegradable packaging or products? Most of the materials that we see for biodegradable packaging and so on, often they're made from either starch-based plastics or polyblactic acid, and most of them, if they're going to degrade, they need to be in kind of industrial composting facilities. Many of you may have, I don't know, disposable coffee machine things with a little capsules and some of them are labeled degradable now and I know lots of my friends have been out and got them and then they put them into their compost heap and then they dig them up a year later and they're still there. And so they

really aren't made for home composting. And most cities around the world, they often don't have the facilities to do industrial large-scale composting. So where I am, it's only a city of about 300,000 people. They don't have municipal composting. They tell us to just compost at home. And so all of these biodegradable packaging, they just end up in a regular landfill, and that's an anaerobic environment, and they're not going to be degrading any time soon. So there's no quick solution.

There's both the materials design aspect, but there's also changing the way we live and how governments on a small scale, particularly municipal regional governments, handle their waste and start investing in industrial composting. With just the last few minutes that we have, I guess I should probably ask you both about that larger scale question. And Francesca, I'll start with you. You're both working on ways to make this problem better. new types of packaging that might degrade better or made from more sustainable products, enzymes that can break down the plastics in our environment. But if you had a magic wand, Francesca, I mean, how would you make this entire process just a little bit better? Could we think about this differently? I think we all, you know, everybody out there needs to think about the bigger picture of both that, you know, there's a beginning and an end of life.

And so if we're more conscious as consumers about what we buy and are willing to spend a little bit more on something that, you know, maybe had a, you know, a renewable start to life and didn't come from petrochemicals, that would go a long way. And also just consuming less, so we have less waste to dispose of. Greg, how about you? How do you think about this in the big picture? Right. I think in the grand scheme of things, I break this problem into two pieces. One is today's plastics, the things that we make now that are inherently challenging or impossible to recycle. I think that it is imperative that we develop technologies and the associated infrastructure as well,

which certainly will take industry, government at all sort of geographical levels all the way up to the planetary scale to be able to work towards technology and infrastructure that can handle today's plastics. I think on the other sort of pillar of this challenge is that we have to think about sort of starting over. We need in the next decades to make plastics that are inherently more sustainable from an environmental perspective that are economically viable relative to the infrastructure that we have today from petroleum and fossil-based carbon that go into plastics today. We need to do the same from a bio-based and waste-based feedstocks perspective. While at the same time thinking about, as Francesca mentioned, the infrastructure for collection and dealing with these things, that involves so many stakeholders across multiple parts of a supply and value chain. That's inherently a massively challenging problem.

But towards your question about magic wand, I think the infrastructure and the technology need to be developed hand in hand across all of those stakeholders. Dr. Greg Beckham is Senior Research Fellow at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado. and Dr. Francesca Curtin is Professor of Chemistry at Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John's in Canada. I want to thank you both for your time today. I really appreciate it. Thank you, John.

Thank you, John. Charles Bergquist is our director. Our producers are Christy Taylor, Katie Feather, and Kathleen Davis. Our senior producer is Alexa Lim. BJ Leaderman composed our theme music. I'm John Dankoski. Thanks so much for joining us.