Garbage In, Plastic Out: Searching for Green Polymers

What if the pollutants spewing from a factory smokestack could be diverted into a nearby processing plant that turned them into plastic?

That's the most interesting proposal discussed in this New York Times roundup of the latest in green polymers, whose researchers are eschewing traditional bioplastics -- made from soy and sugar cane -- in favor of plastic made from organic garbage, including carbon dioxide itself.

The key to CO2-based plastics? Finding a way to bind CO2 with an epoxide, which most of us know as one of two tubes in a hardware store-bought epoxy kits. Normally, CO2 and epoxides would not mix at all, but with the right catalyst, it just might happen.

“Catalysts are like a matchmaker who make a marriage and then can go off and make other marriages, Dr. Coates said. “They accelerate a reaction without being consumed by that reaction.” His catalyst —
beta-diiminate zinc acetate, or “zinc-based pixie dust,” in Dr.
Coates’s words — was designed to speed “a reaction from a geological time scale to the laboratory time scale.”

Dr. Coates is creative with these matchmakers, having developed a catalyst to turn orange peels into a type of Styrofoam.

Related Wired coverage here and here.

Sifting the Garbage for a Green Polymer [New York Times]
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Image: University of Delaware*