Meet the Companies Trying to Break our Plastic Addiction

by Phil McKenna (Green Biz) The fate of the world’s oceans may rest inside a stainless steel tank not quite the size of a small beer keg. Inside, genetically modified bacteria turn corn syrup into a churning mass of polymers that can be used to produce a wide variety of common plastics.

“It’s a bit like making yogurt,” said Oliver Peoples, chief scientific officer of Metabolix, Inc.

The Cambridge, Massachusetts–based company where bioplastics take shape in laboratory-scale fermentation chambers is one of a growing number of businesses and institutions working to develop cost-competitive, more environmentally friendly replacements for conventional plastics, which are made from fossil fuels, fail to decompose and are turning our oceans into seas of floating plastic.

In other words, there are solid reasons for pursuing more sustainable alternatives to conventional plastics — namely, plant-based plastics. Such so-called bioplastics are able to degrade, dramatically reducing the risk that they’ll end up polluting land or sea.

They also lower our dependence on fossil fuels, reducing plastic’s carbon footprint. Greenhouse gas emissions associated with bioplastics are 26 percent lower than those associated with conventional plastic, according to a recent life-cycle analysis of corn-based and petroleum-based plastic by researchers at Michigan State University.

Emerging alternatives
Finding non-petroleum-based, decomposable alternatives to today’s plastics, however, isn’t easy. Plastic made from corn, sugar cane or other plant-based material isn’t necessarily degradable, and getting degradation to occur when you want it to can be difficult.

“You don’t want your plastic bag to degrade while you are using it,” Hillmyer (Marc Hillmyer, director of the Center for Sustainable Polymers at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis) said. “On the other hand, you want it to degrade rapidly when put into another environment.”

One possible way to get around the downsides of plant-based plastics while still reducing dependence on petroleum is to use CO2 as a feedstock instead.

Novomer, a company spun out from research at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, is turning waste CO2 from ethanol production plants into plastic. The company makes polyols — polymers used to make flexible foam found in mattresses, seat cushions and insulation, as well as a range of specialty coatings and sealants.

“If your mattress was made with our material, it would be roughly 22 percent by weight carbon dioxide,” said Peter Shepard, Novomer’s executive vice president of polymers. “It takes a greenhouse gas that is a waste material and turns it into a valuable product.”

Typically CO2 is too inert to react with other compounds, making its use in plastics or other applications difficult. Geoffrey Coates, a chemistry professor at Cornell University in Ithaca and a co-founder of Novomer, developed a catalyst that increased the reactivity of CO2 while simultaneously slowing down the reactivity of another key polyol ingredient — making it easier to incorporate CO2 into the resulting polymer.

Although the company is currently focused on making foams and sealants, Shepard said Novomer’s CO2-based polymers could be used to make degradable plastics with a CO2 content as high as 50 percent. READ MORE