- So if the world continues at its current pace,
by 2050, there's projected to be more plastic
than fish by weight in the ocean.
- On average, the world produces
380 million tons of plastic each year.
Only 9% of it is recycled.
It's estimated that about 20 billion pounds of plastic
flows into the ocean every year.
Plastic that can take hundreds of years to degrade,
if it ever does.
But what if we could make biomaterials that work as well
or better than plastics?
- It turns out there are naturally occurring
microorganisms in the ocean that eat greenhouse gas
as their food, and turn it into PHB inside of their cells.
When you extract it, it's meltable.
It's a material that's strong, dishwasher safe,
all of the things that make plastic great,
and we call it AirCarbon.
- Imagine being able to buy products
that perform like plastics,
but break down harmlessly in the environment.
Well, you actually can.
These AirCarbon products are starting to show up
at Shake Shacks and Targets across the U.S.
The question is,
what's it gonna take to get these everywhere?
This is Make It Count,
a series on environmental innovations
and the math it takes to bring them to the masses.
Most plastics today are produced from petroleum,
but there are two main alternatives.
The first is PLA.
It's made from sugar.
The problem with PLA is that it's still synthetic,
and it won't break down easily in the environment.
The other common alternative is known as PHA,
a common variant of which is the molecule PHB.
- PHB is a molecule
that's made in almost all known living things,
including the human body.
It just so happens that if you extract PHB,
you can turn it into a fine white powder.
And because it's meltable,
you can use it to replace plastic.
The big difference though,
is that plastic is a synthetic material.
In other words, it's not produced in nature.
PHB is different.
It's made in nature,
so nature sees it like a food source,
and will eat it and degrade it like a banana peel.
- Newlight has figured out how to reproduce a process
that occurs naturally in the ocean,
where microorganisms consume air
and greenhouse gases dissolved in salt water
to produce PHB.
And then turn that into powder, pellets,
and ultimately, finished products.
While that certainly sounds really cool,
making that process work at scale, is a journey
that took Mark and his team 18 years to figure out.
- We're aiming to produce the products
that have the most impact.
And one of our goals is to get
to about a 20 billion pound per year production rate,
because that's approximately the amount of plastic
currently flowing into the ocean.
And we wanted to displace that with AirCarbon.
- The key to the widespread adoption of biomaterials
is price parity.
The point when their price is equal to
or less than traditional plastics.
Currently, biomaterials are 20 to 50% more expensive.
- We make such a small fraction
of this coming on, you know, trillion pound per year market
to really have the impact that we want
it's gonna take a lot of work and a lot of steel to get there.
As we go forward now,
we're gonna take this kind of like our solar panel
and just do more of these in a row in a tank farm.
- The cost of plastic
is largely driven by the price of petroleum,
which is pretty low at the moment.
Plastics are also a well-established technology,
manufactured all over the world.
In order to catch up, companies like Newlight
need to start achieving economies of scale.
- And so the next decade, we're gonna be putting in
as much capacity in the ground as we can,
so that we can supply as many people as possible.
We have a very clear path
to being able to provide real volume.
So, scale is the name of the game right now.
- There are other concerns about many biomaterials.
The biggest is competition with food supplies.
As more crops are used to produce biomaterials,
there's less available for food, and the price of food goes up.
But AirCarbon doesn't use food crops.
- The nice thing about using greenhouse gas is,
it allows you to avoid the use of food crops or other things
that would generate environmental damage.
If you think about it, greenhouse gas
is really the feedstock of choice for nature.
And so, we think it's nice to be able to harness
that as carbon resource.
- Right now, bioplastics account for just
1% of the 368 million tons of plastic produced annually.
When can we expect to see a shift?
- Look, it's not gonna be easy
and it certainly isn't automatic, but it's possible.
AirCarbon is currently being sold in over 1,900 locations
across the U.S., in Target, Pilot locations.
Our goal is, hopefully within the next decade,
to get into, you know, as many places as we can
with the goal to displace plastics
with a natural material.
- Most biomaterials are years away
from beating the price of plastic,
but entrepreneurs like Mark are doing everything they can
to bring those technologies to us sooner.
- Every idea was viewed as quasi-impossible
until it became the norm.
Ultimately, I wanna make AirCarbon the most
competitive technology in the world, bar none.