Monday, December 27, 2021

How Plastic Made With Algae Can Clean Waterways | World Wide Waste

The World Wide Waste series from Business Insider is rich with material science content. You'll be seeing most of their videos on the blog eventually, but I certainly recommend watching them before that.

This video explores a project to jointly clean waterways prone to algal blooms and produce plastics which can then be used to produce whatever plastic products would normally be made from many plastics.

Anything that replaces some of our oil-based polymers - even if it's not replacing 100% of the polymer - is a good thing. I appreciate that the latter half o the video explores some of the more complex aspects of this issue - trapping carbon dioxide in plastics isn't the final answer because it still creates more plastics, the causes of the algal blooms, the environmental costs of shipping the algae and products across the oceans. 

It sounds like this is a better option than plastics but that it's not perfect. 

Small steps add up, I guess.

No comments:

Post a Comment