What I Want To Try And Do Here

Hey There👋

This is the part of the newsletter where I don’t have a set topic to write about. It’s open and I’m using today to just kind of be reflective on what I’m doing here. I’m still figuring it out, but I think I’m there.

This issue of the newsletter to sponsored by:

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In 2021 an editor of a well respected chemistry publication asked me what was the main thrust of this newsletter. I didn’t know at the time, but after having thought about it for a few weeks and talking to a guy in a sauna about the newsletter at 180 F for 15 minutes resulted in some clarity. I think I arrived at the answer. It feels hard to distill it down to one sentence, but I’ll try anyway. 

The goal of this newsletter is to show our world is interconnected and the foundations of our modern society sit on the bedrock of polymer chemistry (other chemistry too, but I need to have a somewhat narrow scope. I think other chemists should write newsletters too, Derek Lowe needs company I think). 

Our global society is 100% reliant on cheap and abundant plastics and specialty polymers. Polymers and plastics keep our food fresher longer, they hold our cars together, protect our infrastructure from corrosion, protect our houses and offices from water damage, keep our cars (including EVs) on the road with tires, insulate our wires, and the list could go on till your eyes glaze over. Without polymers and plastics we would be back in the 1920s. 

Polymers and plastics are easy to vilify. There is an abundance of plastic pollution in our ecosystems that causes harm to wildlife. These materials are derived primarily from oil, a finite resource and a root cause of global climate change, and when we landfill plastics they will just sit there. We predict our synthetic polymers will sit around for centuries, but we haven’t had synthetic polymers for centuries just yet, so I’d say we are still in data collection mode. We are finding microbes that can actually metabolize synthetic polymers (crazy right?). To be clear, microbes eating plastic is not a short term solution to our problem. 

Ceasing to make synthetic polymers seems like an easy answer to our problems and it’s an easy one to propose. I think the real solution is actually much more difficult for myriad reasons, but the biggest hurdle is getting the public educated and interested in the nuances of the problem. This is another thing I’m trying to do via this newsletter but at times I tend to write for myself and not the general public. I’ll try to do better. 

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If you are reading this and want to solve the problem of plastic pollution and our dependence on fossilized carbon then you are in the right place. Polymer chemists have known we would probably run out of oil at some point and the gasoline crisis of the 1970s really punctuated this fact. There is abundant academic literature on non-petroleum derived polymers and plastics out there. There are a multitude of academic journals dedicated to the topic. Academic polymer chemists and materials scientists have been working on this problem for over 60 years. In fact before we had fractionated oil distillates chemists were utilizing chemicals derived from nature and it’s why I’ll use the phrase, “everything old is new again” every so often.

So if academics have been working on how we make our plastics and what we should do with them once we are finished for over 60 years then why is this research not being widely adopted by the chemical industry? We should have solved this problem already. It’s a complex question that I’ve thought about a lot and my best answer is one that requires two parts:

1. New things are expensive when entering a mature market

2. Public policy

There is a “new” technique for recycling plastic often referred to as “advanced recycling,” but it’s really just using chemistry to transform plastics back into plastics. Academics have been doing this since the 1990s or earlier. For plastics like polyethylene, polypropylene, or polystyrene we can use techniques such as pyrolysis to either gasify (e.g. syngas: carbon monoxide and hydrogen) or make something resembling an oil distillate (e.g. naphtha). Mechanical recycling of plastics is remelting that plastic down and reusing it and any contaminants in the recycled plastic can lead to problems. 

Obsessively handwashing my peanut butter containers till they are clean is not something I enjoy, but I think this burden of action is too high for a lot of people. Poor spent plastics quality is one reason why they don’t get recycled and this is where advanced recycling techniques have some advantages. If we want to be serious about solving the plastic waste problem, having all of our techniques available to us is important and I am even for banning specific plastics when it makes sense. I think the World Wildlife Fund is the one NGO I could stand beside here without being filled with frustration. Their work is being noticed/used at the UN.

There is also the whole idea of a biodegradable or compostable plastic such as polylactide (PLA) or polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs). This concept is powerful, but it would require a significant amount of composting infrastructure and strict policy and guidelines on what can and cannot go into a composting waste stream. Once again, we would need a very well educated public to make this happen. Imagine just composting the peanut butter jar instead using copious amounts of hot water and soap to try and get it clean.

I think as a society we are aiming in the right direction on these topics I find important and interesting. We just need to all align and push together.

Tony