“There's a great future in plastics” said Mr. McGuire in the movie The Graduate. He was right - plastics revolutionised the world and gained the men who invented it - Karl Ziegler and Guilio Natta, a Nobel Prize.
But now we have to figure out how to reverse engineer that phenomenon.
The scale of the problem, in case you’ve not seen the state of our oceans and waterways, is enormous. Ten years ago, the world produced 315 million tonnes of plastic. This year we have broken through 400 million tonnes. Approximately 32% of plastic globally is winding up in nature, and in parts of Asia it’s much higher. For example, in the Philippines it’s 82%; in Malaysia 63%.
Which means that all of the awareness - all of the negative information about single-use plastics - hasn’t moved the dial. The boom in online shopping has just generated more plastic waste.
Meanwhile, cost pressure is forcing companies to make some tough decisions. I know of a business operating in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore whose signature products result in the use of over a million PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottles daily. A third generation family member has pushed for a change in the business model, whether it's replacing PET bottles with more sustainable materials or transitioning the products into a different form that aligns with sustainability principles. He has met resistance from his extended family business to these adopt more sustainable practices, for reasons of cost.
That's one dilemma frequently faced by family members who believe in sustainability, but find their family businesses and other shareholders resistant to change, often driven by profit motives rather than environmental considerations.
For investors also, cost benefit analysis also often fails to convince. One Asian entrepreneur told me it was not clear to him if the capital available for blue finance is sufficient to really turn dial on marine conservation. Any investment opportunities he looked into will need to satisfy a high impact requirement to overcome basic human nature.
Extreme innovation is required, including the way we reimagine supply chains and packaging. The good news is we do have some high quality innovators creating solutions to the problem of plastic persistence. They may take a while to scale it, but it is within our grasp.
A team at Imperial College London have devised a process to deal with polyolefins – materials used in on-the-go food packaging. The team had shown how to get polyolefins back to nature under real-world conditions in less than a year.
They have uniquely figured out the reason that plastic is so persistent is that it has a really hard crystalline backbone. Its crystallinity is like an exoskeleton. If they can change the material to make it perishable, they can solve the problem.
Polymateria have contracts with a number of big global manufacturers and they have now got the biodegradable process down to less than six months. This includes plastic films and collation shrink, crisp packets, overwraps and sachets, all biodegrading to nothing with no eco-toxicity issues.
As with other areas of sustainability, it’s not just about the science. With any innovation, you need to bring the world with you. That is still a great unknown quantity. What will it cost to effect behavioural change? Education and the provision of adequate disposal and collection are vitally important, especially in poorer areas, where people live close to nature.
The scary aspect is that there is much plastic pollution we can’t see. Marine scientists simply don’t know how much there is and just how detrimental it is to marine life and human health. What we do know is it will bioaccumulate in us and in nature unless we can destroy that crystallinity.
At least now we can see that science is coming up with answers to how we can reengineer the great plastics revolution of the late 20th century.
Posted 03 Oct 2024
