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How seafood shells could help solve the plastic waste problem
Crustaceans' hardy shells contain chitin, a material that, along with its derivative chitosan, offers many of plastic's desirable properties and takes only weeks or months to biodegrade, rather than centuries.
The challenge is getting enough pure chitin and chitosan from the shells to make bio-based "plastic" in cost-effective ways. "There's no blueprint or operating manual for what we're doing," says John Keyes, CEO of Mari Signum, a start-up company based just outside of Richmond, Va., that is devising ways to make environmentally friendly chitin. But a flurry of advances in green chemistry is providing some guideposts.
[...] Entrepreneurs are trying to launch new chitin products. Cruz Foam, a company in Santa Cruz, Calif., set out to produce surfboards from chitin, though the company has since pivoted to focus on the much larger market of packaging foam. Polystyrene foam, a common component in both surfboards and food packaging, takes a minimum of 500 years to biodegrade. Company cofounder Marco Rolandi is convinced that his Cruz Foam will biodegrade readily, based on his at-home test. "I put Cruz Foam in my backyard compost and a month later there were worms growing on it," he says. Eco-friendly surfboards and wound dressings are valuable, but they are niche products — small potatoes that won't make a dent in the massive amounts of fossil fuel–based plastics. Scientists have proposed large-scale production of chitin or chitosan in the past. But the chemistry for isolating the materials from shell waste has some big drawbacks, so the work didn't get far.
[...] Approaches that reduce or eliminate corrosive reagents, recycle water and keep the polymers strong are in demand, says Pierre-Olivier Morisset of Merinov, a research center in Gaspé, Canada, that helps marine-product companies manage waste and commercialize innovations. "We're looking for technologies that can produce hundreds of kilograms" of chitin or chitosan with long polymer chains, Morisset says.
Advances in Functional Chitin Materials: A Review (DOI: 10.1021/acssuschemeng.8b06372) (DX)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 09 2019, @04:07AM (3 children)
Get your FULL deposit back when you return a plastic bottle.
(Score: 2) by EJ on Tuesday July 09 2019, @07:33AM (1 child)
The problem is "then what?" We already have people tossing plastic bottles into the recycling bin, but the recycling center has nothing to do with them. We need to stop making plastic beverage bottles.
Aluminum cans are easily melted down for reuse.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 10 2019, @08:45AM
a) Burn it for energy - especially for countries that are already burning fossil fuels for energy.
b) Sort them then stick them in their corresponding landfills and future generations will mine them for materials. We already mine coal deposits which are mostly dead plants that didn't biodegrade fully.
By the way, quite a number of microbes and creatures have already developed the ability to eat some plastics. And plastics haven't really been around for that long. Give it enough time and we'd likely have to treat outdoor plastics the same way we have to treat wood if we want it to last. Fungi, bacteria, termites etc will start eating the plastic. So if a landfill is too exposed or disturbed a fair amount of it may end up being eaten and not be a deposit.
This won't solve the plastic problem in the time scales we want just like fungi and termites don't solve our problem if a tree trunk is dumped on a road, but just saying it may end up not being a big problem for much of "Nature".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 09 2019, @09:08AM
> Get your FULL deposit back when you return a plastic bottle.
Where do you live? Here in NY state we pay $0.05 bottle deposit and get it all back on return.