Just a few articles back, Marina talked about plastics and some of its perennial issues with recycling. A new breakthrough promises to end all those ecological headaches. If new research is to be believed, boffins at IBM may have developed a process that does away with the petroleum based process for plastics. Instead, the new technology uses plants as the mother source.Plastics derived from plants have one game turning advantage – they can be made biodegradable. Chandrasekhar “Spike” Narayan, a manager of science and technology at IBM’s Almaden Research Center in Northern California said that the plastics will not only be biodegradable but the entire manufacturing process will be energy efficient.
According to Narayan,
“Plant plastics for things such as car parts could be made at lower costs than petroleum-based plastics while materials of soda bottle quality are ‘competitive’.”
IBM said – “This discovery and new approach using organic catalysts could lead to well-defined, biodegradable molecules made from renewable resources in an environmentally responsible way.”
If the new process can be translated to industrials scale, it could usher in an era of sustainability and permanently do away with the problem of choking landfills.
The new age process uses organic catalysts that can be repeatedly recycled. Petroleum based plastics, on the other hand, use metal oxide catalysts which are single use and the whole plastic manufacturing process is a polluting nightmare.
The far reaching effects of biological plastics could be in medicine. Made bio-compatible, they can be used for precision drug delivery.
What is lending credence to the discovery is IBM’s involvement. The innovation has come out from their labs and now one of the world’s biggest technological behemoths is working with scientists at King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia to put the discovery to work, especially in the recycling of plastics used in food and beverage containers.
This new breakthrough could be very fortuitous for the much hammered plastic industry too. It may allow them to go on with just a change in process. And we can continue to enjoy the advantages of this versatile product without any of the eco-sensitive consequences.
In order to recycle plastics, you have to have some knowledge about the types of plastics and which ones you can even recycle. If you don’t have much experience recycling plastics or are unsure of which ones can go in your curbside bin, this overview of plastics by the numbers can be your guide.Most plastics have a number imprinted inside of a recycling triangle, usually at the bottom of the product, which actually tells you quite a bit about the plastic. These resin identification codes are used to label different types of plastics, and your local recycling center or curbside pick up will only take certain numbers. Below are plastics one through seven so you can do more reducing, reusing and recycling.Plastic No. 1

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