System 001...through 003

Seven or so years ago a non-profit group known as The Ocean Cleanup launched System 001 (aka Wilson) into the Pacific Ocean to begin cleanup on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a high-concentration 'soup' of plastic between Hawaii and the Western Coast of the United States. 

Initial results were - by their own description - promising, though they did have some "unscheduled learning opportunities" leading to the creation of System 001/B then on to System 002 (aka Jenny). 

Why Can’t We Scoop All the Plastic Out of the Ocean?

Arrggggh!!!

Why can't the world be simpler?

We have dumped a bunch of plastic into the ocean. Bad!

Some people are trying to clean up that plastic from the ocean. Good?

Maybe...but it's more complicated than just "Good!" because there are tiny neuston (from wikipedia: "organisms that live at the surface of a body of water, such as an ocean, estuary, lake, river, or pond") that use those floating plastics to help stay afloat and on which they lay eggs, and removing all the plastic would remove a significant portion of their habitat...which might be bad for the environment as a whole.

So removing that plastic from the ocean might be Bad!

Arrrrrgggghhh!!!

Is biodegradable better? Making sense of 'compostable' plastics

I think I've made my opinion abundantly clear around here before: we have to stop using plastics.

Manmade polymers are bad for us and for our environment in almost every case.

I say all this from no moral high ground as I'm typing this on a laptop with a plastic case, plastic keys, and assuredly plastic components glued and soldered in ways that make it relatively impossible to recycle.

Today's article - from phys.org - states what seems like a pretty clear and undebatable conclusion: people are confused as to what biodegradable, bioplastic, and compostable mean, and that confusion might lead to even more plastic trash around our world.

Experts on all sides of the biodegradable battleground agree that beyond reducing use, governments need to set up better disposal infrastructure to ensure biodegradable plastics don't end up in oceans and on forest floors.

Preaching to the choir there...

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.

PBF - Dick (webcomic)

From Perry Bible Fellowship - https://pbfcomics.com/comics/dick/

See, it's funny because...well, it's probably only funny in a really, really dark way.

There's this guy who seems to be captaining a whaling ship. We'll call him Ahab. 

He seems to have spotted something, a whale, we assume.

He takes a drink from the colorful bottle in his hand...then drinks from a series of very colorful, seemingly modern bottles.

We close by seeing the whale dead in an ocean littered with plastic waster.

See, it's funny because we're killing our ocean's life by polluting the water with plastics.

Get it?

As an aside, be warned that many other cartoons on PBF are less school-appropriate. Browse at your own risk. They are, however, often hilarious in very dark ways.

NSFW: Plastics: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

I know, I know.

I've promised that I would only post videos and articles that are safe for work.

This one definitively breaks that self-imposed rule. This one should NOT be shown to students at school unless you have a really good relationship with your Board of Education and some pretty mature students.

The video mentions - as comedic asides - sex toys, numerous f-bombs, loads of s-bombs ('shot' but with a different vowel), and cheapshots at the blobfish.

But there's a whole lot of actual content about the environmental horrors of our plastic obsession, our lack of recycling in the face of more and more claims of recycling, the advertising push from the plastics industry to convince us all that the lack of recycling is our individual faults (including the famous crying Italian-American commercial, the route that plastics take into our stomach and body, the US's refusal to sign onto plastic waste reduction treaties, the movement to pass extended producer responsibility bills.

The video is well worth watching. There's good content in there. And I'll admit to enjoying the crass humor.

Green materials for a greener world: Athanassia Athanassiou at TEDxRoma

Ah, TED in Rome...discussions of pizza and gelato, gladiators and forums, Catholicism and plastics...

You know, plastics. The worst thing that we've done for our environment and that we keep using more of every day.

This video opens with an enumeration of the environmental horrors of plastics - volatile gas releases, effects on our hormones, increasing petroleum needs, oil spills and seeps, toxic discharges into the environment - and shifts to alternate options to our uses of polymers.

The speaker, Athanassia Athanassiou (seriously, that's what the title says), illustrates some of the polymer replacements or adaptations that her research group is working on to either modify polymers to actually help the environment or to replace the polymers with other materials.

The video is more a survey of some research than it is an inspirational TED talk. Neat ideas, though.

(As an aside, why would the foreign TEDx conferences be presenting in English? None of the TEDx conferences in America are in foreign languages. Just wondering...)

Plastic Pollution: How Humans are Turning the World into Plastic

I am wildly unhappy with the results of the survey quoted at 6:25: "making a single-use plastic bag requires so little energy and produces far lower carbon dioxide emissions compared to a reusable cotton bag, that you need to use your cotton bag 7100 times before it would have a lower impact on the environment than the plastic bag."

Seriously?

That's kind of depressing.

The video actually does a great job presenting a very balanced view of plastics, presenting facts that show that just not using plastics isn't as easy as it looks at first blush.

How Plastic Bottles are Recycled into Polyester

There's a whole lot of labor involved in recycling.

And it looks like it's largely done by hand in nations with lower worker payments and laxer labor laws than the US.

But then again, what else are we going to do with all our old water bottles?

The afterlife of plastics

In 2003 I read an article titled "Anything Into Oil" from Discover magazine. That article described a process through which effectively all trash (other than heavy metals) was going to be recycled into usable oil of various molecular weights.

That's it, I thought, no more trash. We're done. We've got that whole trash problem licked. All the landfills can be dug back up and run through the Anything-Into-Oil-er machine to make profit. Step two had finally been solved.

Two years later...update... two more years later...another update...

Flash to seven years later than that and I'm still sending my trash to Mount Rumpke.

Along comes "The Afterlife of Plastic" from Al Jazeera in which we get to read about a new plant opened up to turn plastic into oil. Some of the details are simplified a bit...

Plastic is usually made by heating crude oil, cooling it and adding preservatives so it is able to hold its shape. It can then be molded into light, flexible forms for use as shopping bags, takeout containers or plastic toys.

I'm all in favor of the recycling of plastic and keeping microscopic bits out of the oceans and everything, but I've been hearing promised solutions to the intractable problems with plastics for a decade now.

Don't toy with my emotions here, folks.

Thanks, by the way, to Brian Wright for passing this link along.

What really happens to the plastic you throw away - Emma Bryce

Don't throw away plastic bottles.

Heck, don't throw away much of anything at all, in fact. We have to stop landfilling pretty much everything that we currently throw away.

Don't throw plastic bottles into the stream because otherwise it'll find its eventual way to one of the gyres.

Recycle your plastic.

Recycle everything, in fact.

I appreciate the tracking of the three different outcomes for the triplet of identical plastic bottles in this video.

Google Science Fair: Meet Elif Bilgin

I had a student last year figure out how to make a bow and arrow out of a paper clip and a rubber band from his braces.

That's practically as awesome as make a bioplastic from banana peals, right?

Magic Molecule by Christopher Chapman & Hugh O'Connor,

Man, the '60's, huh?

Throw in the fact that these filmmakers are Canadian, and you have an absolutely perfect recipe for weirdness.

This video - available online thanks to the National Film Board of Canada - certainly is weird and dated, but it makes for a pretty impressive overview of what the dreams of a plastic world used to be.

Nowadays the world of plastics tends to be viewed with a far more environmentally-suspicious lens than the one through which our intrepid polymerist gazes at 2:00, but in the 1960's, everything was coming up plastics.

I do believe that at 5:40, we have a composite.

And I just love the opening poem...

It's a fine phenolic, acrylic day.

The cellusoics are in good fettle, and there's a hint of melamine in the air.

Yes, everything is perfectly synthetic, for this is the bright, new world of plastic products.

...and the cool shorts outfit at 1:28...

...and the beautiful world of 7:04...

...and the Legos from 7:20 through 7:40...

...and the boat of 7:50...

Hey, what happened to the old dude at 7:50? Where'd he go?

PS: Thanks to Kristin for the find here. As always, if you find a great materials science video, feel free to send it my way.

How Plastic Bottles are Made

This video shows how PET bottles are made, and I'm happy to see that it starts with at least some post-consumer plastic ingredients. I'm disheartened to  hear that no more than 10% of the bottle can be recycled content.

The note at 2:40 saying that the machine is being shown in slow motion is disappointing but not shocking. I wish we could get to see the machine at full speed, though, even if only to see that it's too fast for us to see.

The How It's Made series is brilliant and is an absolute must-see series for materials science teachers.

Scientific Tuesdays: Turn Styrofoam into pseudo-plastic

The demonstration of dissolving Styrofoam into acetone is one that we do in the summer ASM workshops, typically selling the demonstration by counting how many Styrofoam peanuts you can crush into a film canister, having hidden a small amount of acetone in the canister before the beginning of the demonstration.

At the end of the demonstration, however, we always end up with an amount of goopy, dissolved Styrofoam mess. The presenter in this video uses the term pseudo-plastic for what is left at the end when the goopy mess hardens. I'm a little curious as to why the pseudo comes into play, but that may have to do with my lack of understanding of exactly what plastic means.

Anybody want to clarify for me?