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Combatting the Plastic Waste Crisis with Enzymes

Researchers at UC Berkeley are working on a solution to solve the global, single-use plastic waste problem by creating a biodegradable plastic. They are doing so by infusing enzymes into the plastic, which cause the material to break down into its original components when submerged in compost or even warm water. The process allows the plastic to self-destruct, so it doesn't end up in landfills, and it does so without creating any harmful micro-plastics. Additionally, Intropic Materials, the university spinoff company that is looking to commercialize this technology, was just named the Grand Prize winner in our 2021 Create the Future Design Contest! 

Topics:
Materials Plastics

More From SAE Media Group

    Transcript

    00:00:00 (soft upbeat music) - The common misunderstanding with things that are marked as compostable or biodegradable is that maybe, "Hey, this is kind of like a banana peel "or an apple core." Most people assume that plastics like the ones I'm holding, which are branded on the market as compostable or biodegradable, that you can just throw them in your backyard, or when you're on a hike, just throw them in a bush

    00:00:24 and they'll degrade over time. That's not true. You do that, it'll take many, many years to wait before anything will happen, and even then, it'll break down to microplastics, which will pollute our environments and our bodies. What our team has done here at our lab is that we found a way to put enzymes, which are things in bacteria that will actually break down these plastics.

    00:00:47 We put them inside our plastic, and now they're much more easily degradable, either in home compost or in industrial compost solutions, or even in water that's heated up. And when they break down, they don't result in any microplastics. (music continues) We use this microscope to take a really deep look into what our film actually looks like at the nanoscopic scale.

    00:01:09 The black dots shown here are actually our enzymes, and you can see how they're nice and dispersed all across the film. And that's what we like to see. And this shows that the enzymes do not actually clump together but are nicely spread apart, which allows for them to be degraded. Even when they're on the microplastic scale, we see that the black dots are nice and spaced apart,

    00:01:28 so little bits of microplastics will still have enzymes in them actively eating them apart. (music continues) To decompose the plastic, simply put your plastic bags into warm water, leave it for days to weeks, and it'll break down into the individual building blocks of the plastic, such that these can actually be collected

    00:01:47 and remade into new plastics. (music continues) So, this pink polymer I have here is called our random heteropolymer, or RHP for short, and it is the special secret ingredient in our truly compostable plastics that we use to protect the enzymes that are inside our plastics that eat it and make it compostable. What we do to mix it with the enzymes

    00:02:09 and to form that protective layer is, we first have to dissolve it in water, which I do overnight, which allows me to then mix it with the enzymes, which are also water. (music continues) The reason we have a plastic problem is because plastics are really great. They're used in all kinds of medical applications, and they can save lives in terms of helmets

    00:02:28 and other things like that. So if we can present a solution of a truly compostable plastic, hopefully, we can then actually start to phase out fossil fuel-based plastics and make these biodegradable plastics with our added protected enzymes in it more widespread for use. (music continues) One thing I'm super excited about going forwards

    00:02:47 is seeing how this technology works its way into the market. Where is its first use gonna be? We don't have a hundred years to solve the plastic waste crisis. We have to act now. And I believe that with the innovations that we've made, along with innovations made from other research groups, we can do it. I wanna be involved in it, and I wanna see it happen. (music continues)