To try and minimize this impact, a team of scientists from the Yale School of the Environment (YSE) and the University of Maryland has developed a high-quality plastic that biodegrades and is recyclable — and it's made from wood byproducts.
The hope is to shift away from petrochemical plastics to renewable and biodegradable plastics — something that's proven tricky to do.
How wood can be turned into plastic
The team found a way to deconstruct the porous matrix of natural wood into a slurry — a mixture of solids that's denser than water. To create this slurry mixture, the team took wood powder and broke the loose and porous part of it down using a biodegradable and recyclable deep eutectic solvent .
The end material displays high mechanical strength, good stability when holding liquids, and UV-light resistance. On top of that, it's also biodegradable and can be recycled, and has a lower life-cycle environmental impact than petroleum-based plastics.
Ultimately, the high solid content and viscosity of the mixture can easily be cast and rolled without breaking apart — into plastic bags, for instance.
Going a step further, the team then compared the environmental impact of the bioplastic with regular plastic by burying sheets of the bioplastic in soil. After two weeks it fractured, and after three months it had entirely degraded. That's a heck of a lot shorter than a few hundred years.
If that wasn't enough, the degraded bioplastic can then be broken back down into the slurry, to be recovered and reused.
This tiny creature could take a bite out of global plastic pollution
"That, to me, is what really makes this plastic good: It can all be recycled or biodegraded," says Yuan Yao, assistant professor of industrial ecology and sustainable systems at YSE and co-author of the paper. "We’ve minimized all of the materials and the waste going into nature."
Potential impacts of using this bioplastic
A major issue that could arise from turning wood into bioplastics could mean a strain on forests. The team is aware of this issue if large-scale production of bioplastics takes off, as massive amounts of wood would be required.
To try and find a solution the team is working closely with a forest ecologist to create forest simulation models, so as to link the growth cycle of forests with the manufacturing process.
If everything is possible on a safe environmental level, this bioplastic could be used to replace plastic bags, or large sheets of plastic coverings — drastically minimizing plastic pollutants.
We’re all too aware of the consequences of plastics in the oceans and on land. However, beyond the visible pollution of our once pristine habitats, plastics are having a grave impact on the climate too.
Newly published research calculates that across their lifecycle, plastics account for 3.8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. That’s almost double the emissions of the aviation sector. If it were a country, the "Plastic Kingdom" would be the fifth-highest emitter in the world.
Demand is set to rise, too. At 380m tonnes a year, we produce 190 times more plastic than we did in 1950. If the demand for plastic continues to grow at its current rate of 4 percent a year, emissions from plastic production will reach 15 percent of global emissions by 2050.
More than 99 percent of plastics are manufactured from petrochemicals, most commonly from petroleum and natural gas. These raw materials are refined to form ethylene, propylene, butene, and other basic plastic building blocks, before being transported to manufacturers.
The production and transport of these resins requires an awful lot of energy – and therefore fuel. Greenhouse gas emissions also occur during the refining process itself – the “cracking” of larger hydrocarbons from petrochemicals into smaller ones suitable for making plastic releases carbon dioxide and methane. According to the study, about 61 percent of total plastic greenhouse gas emissions come from the resin production and transport stage.
A further 30 percent is emitted at the product manufacturing stage. The vast majority of these emissions come from the energy required to power the plants that turn raw plastic materials into the bottles, bin bags and bicycle helmets we use today. The remainder occurs as a result of chemical and manufacturing processes – for example, the production of plastic foams uses HFCs, particularly potent greenhouse gases.
