We've heard a lot about plastics in the news and it's not been good news.
Plastic waste causes so many problems for animals and their habitats. It goes into
the food chain, it entangles, them it's awful. But that's not the only problem
that plastic causes in the environment. Plastics are made from fossil fuels and
so producing them releases carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases into the
atmosphere increasing global warming. Globally the plastics industry produces
3.8% of all greenhouse gases that's nearly double the aviation
industry. So you may think it's a little bit odd that this video is being funded
by Dow, one of the largest plastics companies in the world and I was super
skeptical when they emailed me. But they've invited me here to Finland to
learn about this new technology they're investing in to make bioplastics, that is
plastics made from wood and not from fossil fuels. So this drastically reduces
the greenhouse gas emissions and we're going to need bioplastic technologies
like this if we're going to have any chance of reducing global warming in time.
So how do you make plastics from wood? Well first you've got to have a
good source of wood and here in Finland they're using FSC forest; that is forests
that are being sustainably managed in this case as part of the paper industry.
Many biofuels projects have some pretty big downsides; if you are changing land
use so you're chopping down the Amazon rainforest in order to plant sugarcane
or if you're diverting food out of the food chain so not only is there less
food for humans to eat but also it's increasing the price of food those
aren't great. But in this project, this wood was here anyway, this is being
managed sustainably to make paper and it's the byproducts of that industry
what would otherwise go to waste that's being used to ultimately make plastics.
Naturally when faced with the biggest pile of wood chips I've ever seen, my
first reaction was to frolic in the chips. Apparently no one has ever frolicked on
this chip mountain before they're missing out.
These wood chips have all
been produced for the pulp industry to make paper and cardboard and things like
that. But wood is more than just pulp. Pulp is
just the cellulose part of the wood and a lot of the rest of the wood is this
thing called lignin. It's another structural compound, just
like cellulose like roughage or fibre, but it's waterproof and it's a lot
tougher to work with chemically. So in the past they would have extracted the
cellulose out of the wood and then just thrown the lignin part away, maybe burnt
some of it to recover some of the energy but couldn't really use the chemical
properties of it. But that lignin is dissolved into something called crude
tall oil. This is what happens when you add a load of alkali chemicals, heat and
pressure to the wood. You end up with this beautifully white pulp to make
paper and this brown sludgy stuff. This is the unrefined lignin.
Jaakko knows
everything there is to know about the biorefinery here, so I asked him some
very scientific questions.
So why is it called tall oil because it's not very tall?
It comes from
the Swedish language: "tallolja" means "pine tree".
Ok, so this is pine oil in essence? In a way, yes.
Does it smell like pine? No it doesn't. No?
No it doesn't. It smells like... a bit like cooking chemicals.
It's not the fresh... Not like air freshener, the little thing you hang up in your car
Let's give it a little waft... Oh. Ew. Yeah, that's...
That's weird. It's a bit like a tar
added with a sulphuric It is!
sulphuric part You definitely get that egginess from the sulphur
But you also get a kind of smoky... yeah that's... I would never have guessed that to have come from a tree.
And what UPM have worked out how to do is how to turn this into this.
This colourless liquid is naphtha and so that's a mixture of
hydrocarbons, so things like petrol, diesel, all of those short chain carbon
and hydrogen molecules that are super useful not only for biofuels but also
for making plastics
In the biorefinery with the crude tall oil, where with the
catalysts, high pressure, high hydrogen pressure and temperature, we are
chemically converting this syrup-like material into bright and clear pure hydrocarbons.
So catalysts are the secret sauce. Yeah this does look like sauce
This looks like something you'd pour over meat. So it depends on the
selection of different catalysts which will be the reactions taking place.
Then the hydrocarbons are distilled and then the liquids are the light
boiling hydrocarbons; the naphtha components.
And what's great about this
this bio naphtha is it is chemically identical to naphtha that's come from
fossil fuels. You can't tell just by looking at an unlabelled bottle that it's
been made from wood chips. And so you can pour bio-naphtha straight into the
machines that produce these. These are plastic nurdles or the most basic form
of plastic. And one use of these wood-derived plastic nurdles is packaging.
And this packaging is kind of cool because it not only has the plastic component
the lignin part of the wood but obviously that's a lot of paper involved
in this as well so it's also using the cellulose part of the wood.
And what they're doing here means that no part of the wood gets thrown away. You get entire
logs coming in: first it goes to timber; if it can't be used for timber it's used
for pulp; if it can't be used for pulp it's used to make naphtha, and that naphtha
that goes on to make plastics; and anything that's left over you can then
burn to generate enough electricity to run the entire plant, so that this
plant is self-sufficient, it doesn't need to take energy off the
grid in fact it provides electricity to the rest of Finland.
Thomas is the product director for Dow and oversees this whole project to make
bio plastics from wood.
So what are the benefits of using wood based naphtha?
Look, it's another sustainable solution that we are looking into and the big
benefit is actually reducing greenhouse gases. So if we replace one tonne of
fossil fuels with one ton of bio naphtha, we are saving 2.86 tonnes of greenhouse gases.
That's so cool and that means that when you scale it up and you're producing hundreds or
thousands of tonnes of bio naphtha that's gonna make a noticeable difference in
greenhouse gas emissions. Correct.
We can multiply this effect the more we scale it.
So what is special about this project? What's special about this project is that
it's scalable. It's the first time that we can offer a scalable product that
actually our customers can use then to produce a packaging. And your customers
aren't the people going to the supermarkets they're the people who make
the products that people at home buy. Correct. And so for them to say we want
to make sustainable... we want to only use sustainable plastic in our packaging, we
want to use stuff that's been derived from wood, that's a big deal! Yes it is!
It's the first time we actually have can have a choice, right? We can have a choice buying
something that is made out of fossil fuel or buying something that is made
out of renewable sources. That's really cool.
I have so many flies in my hair right now that I can't... Me too!...
Carsten is the commercial director and as the voice of Dow on this trip I wanted to ask him
some of the tougher questions, but fair play to him he was happy to answer them all.
Dow is one of the biggest plastic companies in the world is that safe to say?
That's safe to say. So why are you interested in bio plastics?
So one of the reasons... we are one of the biggest producers in the world but we are not
interested to see plastics in the environment. We also are not interested in
consuming a lot of resources in the world so we're very interested in this
partnership with UPM and bio plastics from renewable feedstock sources
because it's a good way of actually saving on fossil fuels and using
renewable sources to produce plastics.
There's always the risk that if someone
in the supermarket sees "oh this is a sustainable plastic" they're like "oh I've
done my bit now I can just throw it away and forget about it".
Are you...is there anything you can do there because recycling plastic is
surprisingly difficult. I literally have a PhD from Oxford and I can be stood by
the recycling bin trying to work out if it's recyclable or not and what bin it
has - like it's hard! It is very complex, and I have the same situation at home
Is this recyclable this is not recyclable which is why one of the things that
we're focusing on is "design for recyclability" so we should, as consumers,
know that when we pick down that package from the shelf it's recyclable. We have
technology in that field that we can apply and we're going to do that as a
matter of fact we are doing that. And then to your to your other points, we're
working on other things that we can bring plastic back either via an oil or
into the same kind of application in a circular system because we really
believe that plastics should be part of the circular economy like other materials.
So what is the circular economy? So a circular economy is...
Today we're working in a linear economy. So we make the plastic, we use the
plastic, we throw the plastic away. So what we want to do is that the
plastic is not thrown away but it comes back as a raw material for our
production, either in a shape of (like I explained before) mechanical recycling, so
it's washed, it's shredded and goes back into an application, or if it's really
lower quality we turn it into an oil and then we make plastic from it.
So we all know that plastics are terrible in terms of greenhouse gas emissions that they
when they end up in the environment they're a terrible polluter that just
never go away and Dow has been making money doing this for the last few
decades. Is this initiative just too little too late? So to your point, no one
wants to see plastic in the environment. We don't want to see plastic in the
environment. We believe that plastic is way too valuable to end up in the
environment. And this initiative with UPM on renewable feedstock it's just one
of four initiatives that we're actually driving.
You know, we don't support plastic if plastic is not the most sustainable
choice for an application. We don't support overuse of plastics.
Which I have to point out, you've been saying on this trip that Dow does not
support the overuse of plastics. I think that that is huge for a plastics company
to say "you know what, we could make money by selling you plastic for this use but
we'd rather not".
Dow is a big company, and big companies at the end of the day
are gonna try and want to make more money because otherwise the company
wouldn't continue to exist so how are you making money from sustainable plastics?
So we have we have to remember one thing: that this is the market that's
demanding this. It is us as consumers we want plastic to be recyclable, we want
recycled content, we are driving this. This is not an initiative about making more
money, this is us engaging in making plastic part of the circular economy.
A recent study found if we're going to significantly reduce the amount of
greenhouse gases produced by the plastics industry we're going to have to
do four things. We're gonna have to reduce demand, we're gonna have to
recycle the plastics that we do make, we're going to have to use bio plastics,
and the energy we use in producing has to come from renewable sources like wind
energy or tidal energy. But this study also found that doing just one of those
isn't enough. Just recycling isn't enough. Just reducing demand of plastics isn't
enough. We've got to do all four. And so whilst it's great that on a small scale
individuals reduce how much plastic they use, using a reusable coffee cup, not
taking a plastic straw if you don't need one, that's great. But we need big scale
changes on the scale of big companies like Dow if we're going to make a big
enough impact. Although Dow may have been part of the global problem we need
them if we're going to have a global solution that's going to be effective.
Plastics are useful materials. They can reduce emissions from food waste. They
can be made sterile for medical uses. Plastics are useful and they're here to
stay. So as long as we think about where we're getting the materials from, about the
energy that goes into them and how we dispose of them, they're going to be
around but they needn't necessarily be quite so bad for us.
This video is part
of Team Trees! We are all across YouTube making videos about trees and the
environment to try to plant 20 million trees by the start of 2020. And the way
you do that is you donate $1 at teamtrees.org or at the YouTube donate button
just below this video. And Arbor Day Foundation who are a tree planting
charity have agreed that they will plant a tree for every dollar raised which means
that you can plant 10 trees in less than the time it takes me to plant a single
tree in Finland. What can I say the ground was very hard it was surprisingly
tough to plant that tree. And then once you planted your trees all around the
world, go and search the team trees hashtag all across YouTube. You'll see
there are massive creators that you'll almost certainly have heard of and
smaller ones so discover new YouTubers across all different genres making
videos about trees and the environment and we're going to try and take over
YouTube from now until the end of the year so that the trending page is just
videos about trees and the environment and all of your recommendations are
about trees and the environment and climate change. How cool would that be
and what a great message would that send out. So go to teamtrees.org to find out more,
donate, plant your trees, spread the word, and let's make more trees in the world