I’ve talked about recycling before, and the various problems with how we currently do it, and the limitations of the materials, etc.; but let’s review:<\/p>\n
So aside from metals (and obviously organic stuff that can be composted), it doesn’t appear that we have a lot of recycling we can actually do<\/span>4<\/sup><\/a><\/span>.<\/p>\n Except, that’s not entirely true.<\/p>\n Paper is biodegradable.\u00a0 Burn it, pulp it into a slurry, compost it.\u00a0 Mother Nature will return it to the food chain.\u00a0 Think of it as full circle recycling.\u00a0 The paper comes from plants, and after composting it, it is returned to the plants.\u00a0 Same goes for natural textiles.\u00a0 So once we hit that 7th use, just send it back to the biosphere.<\/p>\n But what about plastics<\/a>?<\/p>\n All plastics start out as a hydrocarbon, and then we chemically tease certain refined hydrocarbons into polymers through a catalytic process called polymerization.\u00a0 If the hydrocarbon of choice is petroleum, that process looks like this<\/a>.\u00a0 One of the most common plastics in use today is polyethylene, which is a fancy word for two hydrogen atoms attached to one carbon atom and the carbon atoms are chained together with other CH2 molecules.\u00a0 That’s it, carbon and hydrogen (the definition of a hydrocarbon).<\/p>\n If the plastic is a bio-plastic or bio-polymer, one whose feedstock is cellulose or some other carbohydrate source (there’s that carbon – hydrogen combo again), the process is similar, but involves different catalysts, or employs bacteria, and the end results can be a bit different.<\/p>\n It’s important to keep in mind that not all bio-plastic is bio-degradable or compostable, so the feedstock does not make a specific plastic green.\u00a0 We could be making all of our plastic from agricultural by-products and still have the same problem we do today.<\/p>\n The key is those chains of molecules.\u00a0 They can be hard to break.\u00a0 Which isn’t a bad thing, since we do need materials that are lightweight and durable.\u00a0 But not every use of plastic needs to last decades.\u00a0 Food and drink containers, for example, or plastic bags, or other single use plastic products (Straws! Think of the sea turtles!).\u00a0 Hell, even cheap kids toys (you know, the kinds or toys you get from Happy Meals that your kids will forget about a week after they get them) doesn’t need to be capable of being an heirloom, not every toy is a Lego.<\/p>\n We can design the chains to break.\u00a0 They can be designed to break down in the presence of light, or water, or by bacteria.\u00a0 Often, those breaks just result in plastic particles that we hear about getting into our food and water supplies, basically just smaller and smaller chains of molecules.\u00a0 But if the plastic is designed to be truly bio-degradable, then it is converted to other hydrocarbons or atmospheric gases.\u00a0 Those gases, by the way, are usually carbon dioxide and methane (CH4), which are not desirable gases to release back into the atmosphere<\/span>5<\/sup><\/a><\/span>.\u00a0 And, of course, if the chains are designed to break, the plastic will degrade over time, possibly very quickly, and we may want that plastic to hang around for a while before it’s used.\u00a0 Drink bottles and plastic bags may sit for years unused, so we’d want to be able to trigger things to degrade, which is tricky, which is another way to say, expensive.<\/p>\n So if plastics have a limited recycle life, what do we do?<\/p>\n