Did Someone Say Alternative Plastic?

We have covered a few times in previous posts the reason that oil is such a hot commodity. It's not just your car; liquid dinosaur is used in plastics and plastic based products as well. Those grocery store bags? Petrol based. Your favorite polyester pants/shirt/dress? Petrol based. Oil is used in many industries and forms, some of which are not recognizable as oil (ie: it's easy to see how it's used for cards but not many of the previously mentioned items).

We've gone into this in greater detail in other posts as well, but as a refresher, obtaining and processing oil are both relatively harmful processes for the environment, or rather, they can be. In addition, the resulting materials, if not something consumed in liquid form by machinery, is often dumped into landfills or thrown into the environment, causing issues with pollution and endangering certain organisms.

Wouldn't it be nice to have a version of plastic that's biodegradable and doesn't depend on crude oil? Scientists would agree with that thought as something like that has been created. Two scientists at Boise State University developed a plastic based on (poly) ethyl cyanoacrylate which is an ingredient found in glue-super glue to be exact. We have the "poly" in parenthesis because in glue, it exists as a monomer, but for this plastic product, it's turned into a polymer, which is a repeating chain of a monomer. Basically it's like having a linked versus unlinked barrel of monkeys if you've ever seen that toy.

Would this material work if mass produced like regular plastic? Per their small-scale lab experiments that mimic the industrial process, the answer is yes. There is also the added benefit of the new plastic being about 93% recyclable into clean starter materials even when mixed with other materials (ie: plastic waste, aluminum, and paper).

The biggest question here is "what products would this new plastic replace?" Probably not your favorite clothing, but more than likely it could be used to replace hard plastic packaging. For example, takeaway food containers, packing foam, disposable cutlery, plates, and cups are all considered hard plastics and therefore could be replaced with this new plastic. It may also be worth noting that all of these products stem from polystyrene which only accounts for 6% of the current plastic waste, but a small chunk is still a chunk we don't have to worry about sea turtles choking on or animals getting stuck in. Some reduction in that issue is better than no reduction, especially since if adopted and successful, this new plastic opens the door for other groups to experiment with other types of plastics. And there may be less resistance with replacing traditional plastics with more environmentally friendly ones, especially if the environmentally friendly ones have proven to be just as durable as the crude oil-based plastics we're used to seeing. Sounds good, right?

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