By Megan Lowry

From N-95 masks that are protecting health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic to food packaging found in every aisle of the grocery store, plastics play an essential role in our lives. Nearly every sector of the economy depends on them. The scale of production is huge — since plastic’s invention, over 8,300 megatons have been manufactured.

The negative environmental impact of plastics is enormous, however, and it’s twofold. Most common polymers are made using fossil fuels, which results in large amounts of the greenhouse gas emissions that are a major driver of climate change. And, once their original purpose has been served, most plastics are then discarded as waste, overwhelming landfills and polluting oceans. Only about 9 percent of the plastic ever made has been recycled.

Scientific teams working across disciplines are exploring new solutions to the plastics problem. A panel discussion held during the most recent National Academy of Sciences annual meeting, New Approaches to Solving the Plastics Dilemma, explored cutting-edge work that not only benefits the environment but also could create new economic opportunities as well. “I will argue that I think we can do both, and that will include decoupling from fossil fuels, reducing environmental impact of our plastic waste, and trying to think more about after-use options,” said Marc Hillmyer, director of the National Science Foundation’s Center for Sustainable Polymers.

Hillmyer and his colleagues are researching new materials that perform as well as the polymers we use today but rely less on fossil fuels. One group of researchers at the University of Minnesota have showed how lignin feedstocks, a byproduct of paper production, can be used to create plastic from a renewable resource at a comparable cost to traditional methods. Other researchers have developed plastic that degrades when exposed to UV light. Hillmyer says basic research is key to creating the next generation of materials and processes that could solve the plastics dilemma.

Others are discovering new ways of upcycling old plastic products, giving them a second life. Susannah Scott, professor at UC Santa Barbara and director of the Academic Initiative in Sustainability for Sustainable Materials and Product Design, said, “There is another way to think about this, and it comes from the fact that we have a lot of embodied energy and chemical purity in these polymers… The idea that plastics can be a carbon-based resource is very interesting.” Some plastics can be converted to higher-value products, such as plastic timber that can be used in construction, and the chemical components of plastic can be extracted and used in other consumer products.

Jeffrey Moore, Ikenberry Endowed Chair and the director of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, explained that plastic is still needed to solve societal challenges, from replacing aging infrastructure to advancing commercial aviation. Demand for high-strength, lightweight plastics is an opportunity to innovate new material functions such self-healing capabilities that can also improve the lifetime, safety, and sustainability of plastics, he said.

Moore was adamant that working in interdisciplinary teams is key. “This is highly interdisciplinary work. It involves chemists, materials scientists, chemical engineers, mechanical engineers….This is really important to think about this big problem.”

A recording of New Approaches to Solving the Plastics Dilemma and complete list of panelists are available here.