Environmental Health News, Week 15: Sustainable Plastic?

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As we know, plastic was has built up over time and polluted our oceans and our land. What makes plastic so wasteful is that it never breaks down completely, building up as we continue to manufacture more and more products. Fortunately, with technology and great minds today, there is research being conducted to refine plastic. Jianbo Zhu, a polymer chemist, and his team at Colorado State University in Fort Collins are working on creating a plastic that can be reused again and again. They have been working on this process and have found that by adding another ring to a previous creation allowed for the monomers to stick together at room temperature into polymer chains that are heat-stable. The polymers can hold their shape and stability, but then when they are exposed to higher heat levels or mild chemicals, they will revert to their original monomer molecules. In other words, this means that this plastic can be reused and recycled again and again, which is different (and better) than traditional plastic. Zhu and his team continue to work on this project and eventually hope to perfect it and commercialize it.

The idea of plastic that can be reused again and again gives hope for the future. While traditional plastic is difficult to break down and/or recycle, and some of it never even gets recycled at all, it is necessary to move on to more sustainable products. As our oceans are filling up with plastic, we continue to create and add to the waste. Hopefully this new plastic will be usable in our world. Ultimately reducing our plastic usage and manufacturing would be one of the best solutions to the plastic problem, but since our world is so dependent on plastic, creating a sustainable type can definitely help. 

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