I love plastic and I know what you're
thinking I must be crazy how could
someone love plastic when chemicals like
BPA are leached from plastic and plastic
soda rings kill sea life and wildlife
landfills are overflowing plastic bags
are banned the Great Pacific Garbage
Patch is something that occurs when our
materials overflow our landfills and
wind up in the ocean so yeah I get it
plastic has been at the root of many
very serious environmental health and
safety issues and we don't even know
what the long-term negative effects of
plastic are going to be that said I
still want to convince you to love
plastic just as much as I do here's the
core problem there are very few
industrial plastics also known as
polymers that are recycled on large
scale all of these plastics have
something in common which is that they
can be melted and remoulded which is
part of the reason why they're so
popular and at the same time also a
limitation because not all plastics
actually melt even though we do some
recycling it still takes between five
hundred to a thousand years for today's
plastics to completely biodegrade my job
is to make industrial plastics one day I
was working in the lab and I was setting
up a reaction with some sorting material
that I had derived from pet so pet is
the plastic that we make our plastic
water bottles out of I went away from
the flask to gather an ingredient and
when I returned the mixture had hardened
well okay hardened is an understatement
I actually had to take a hammer and
break the flask to get out the plastic
to figure out what exactly I had made
even though I started with some of the
same starting materials as the world's
oldest plastics this Paul
seemed to behave differently I'll tell
you why this is so important because
this plastic is going to be a part of
the solution the plastic that I made
today falls into a class of polymers
known as thermo sets thermo sets
represent the world's strongest
materials there are high-strength
materials robust materials that we use
for things already in things like
airplane parts automotive and micro
electronics so usually you can imagine
thermo sets don't revert and so you
can't really recycle them either but
this thermo set did revert I'm going to
show you how the reversion process works
in a video and basically what I'm doing
is I'm taking a commercial polymer and
then over the revert able thermo set and
I'm putting them into a vial with
sulfuric acid so what you'll see is that
the commercial polymer sinks whereas the
thermo set actually floats 12 hours go
by and the thermo set has completely
dissolved whereas the commercial polymer
has been completely unaffected I can
then neutralize the solutions pH and
what I get is leftover monomer version
of my polymer I can then filter this
monomer collect it and use it to replumb
rise it into either this material or
others so what you just saw was me
recycling a thermo set that is stronger
than bone back down to a powder
furthermore it can take on different
forms for example a self-healing gel
self-healing refers to the fact that if
you take a piece of it and cut it into
pieces and put it back together again
that it seamlessly forms into one piece
again and you can't ever even tell that
it was taken apart all of these
materials can be reverted back to their
original powder I recently came across
this quote and I think it's relevant
here the flow of molecules in the US
economy is 99.98%
pure waste correcting this is the
biggest business opportunity in the
history of the global economy one
argument against recycling is that it's
expensive it's a lot cheaper to just
gather our materials and throw them into
a landfill instead of collecting them
breaking them back down and then
processing them for recycling so why
bother well here's the problem with
thinking about it that way we're not
actually considering the hidden savings
in terms of energy recycling one ton of
plastic and just plastic alone nothing
else in there saves about a hundred
million BTUs worth of energy just to
give you an idea a barrel of oil is
about 5.8 million BTUs so they're for
recycling one ton of plastic saves about
17 barrels of oil furthermore our
current recycled polymers we can only
recycle three to four times before they
lose their mechanical integrity and end
up in something like carpet which we can
no longer recycle imagine the benefits
then of complete reversion of materials
you could recycle an infinite number of
times also combined with portable
additive manufacturing technologies also
known as 3d printing we could build
parts break them back down and then
build them up again all on-site imagine
the implications for this I think of
things like fast lightweight fuel
economic recyclable airplanes drug
delivery sealants water purification
disposable medical devices space
applications but why stop here
Palmer chemists have been know how to
build macromolecules with desired
properties with computational chemistry
we're able to figure out how bonds and
networks form therefore we also know how
to take them apart in essence we have an
unprecedented level of control over our
materials with this knowledge in hand we
can then
make materials that are either designed
to be recycled or derive from waste
every plastic water bottle or even large
parts could be disassembled back into a
pile of powder this would obviously save
on landfill space but also it would
enable us to negate costs associated
with transportation and production of
raw materials which is finite in
addition to that if we needed to we
could break a part down that had a
mistake in it as opposed to just
throwing the entire piece away we need
to change our relationship with plastics
we are not going to live in a world
without plastic so we might as well
figure out a way to make it work for us
as a scientist I dream of discoveries
that will someday change the world it is
my hope that this new material makes its
mark not only by changing our negative
view of plastics but by reintroducing it
as an affordable diverse and sustainable
material that will someday comprise many
of our everyday products thank you