About 8 million tons of plastic become maritime garbage every year, according to scientifically grounded estimates. Only about 14% of the plastic used for wrapping food and bottling water is currently recycled and reused, and the numbers are going up all the time. As countries like China and Vietnam take on western-type lifestyles, they produce more plastic waste –but often without the infrastructure to capture and reconstitute it.
But the good people at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a U.K. nonprofit named after a record-breaking British sailor, is more optimistic than it was back in 2016. It’s persuaded 11 leading consumer brands and packaging companies–including Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Walmart–to move towards 100% reusable, recyclable or compostable packaging by 2025. The U.K. and French governments have committed to circular economies around plastic waste (the French have also banned plastic plates and cutlery).
And this year, the Foundation has helped spur a fair amount of plastics innovation activity through a contest funded by Wendy Schmidt, wife of former Alphabet chairman Eric Schmidt.
From an innovation standpoint, the hardest nut to crack is the 30% of plastics that can’t currently be reused: the sachets, tear-offs, lids, and bags made up of complex or multilayer materials (like chip bags that contain both plastic and metal). That is what the contest aimed to tackle.
“While plastics bring convenience and many benefits, it’s also an example of our current broken take-make-dispose economic model,” says Rob Opsomer, who leads the foundation’s New Plastics Economy work and the contest this year. “At the moment, there is no viable [second] market for these materials. They need fundamental innovation. Today, when you bring it to a recycling facility, there is nothing they can do with it,” he tells Fast Company.
At the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos this week, it announced the latest winners of the contest. They include a team from the University of Pittsburgh, which is making food packaging from layers of polyethylene (which is recyclable). Each layer is nano-engineered to have different properties (like keeping food dry and unspoiled by light). But when the material is melted down, it returns to the same state as traditional polyethylene, so there are no additional steps in the recycling process.
To read the full story, visit https://www.fastcompany.com/40521263/these-bold-ideas-aim-to-make-plastic-waste-a-thing-of-the-past.