First place prize: ecoTrio, biodegradable plastic alternative…
- made exclusively from renewable resources,,,
- …that can be blended to become products ranging from hard plastics to plastic bags
- blends have similar cost and melting point as traditional plastics
- biodegrade regardless of where they end up at the end of their useful lives
At the core of ecoTrio’s product are three materials, two of which the company considers proprietary. The first is a polymer that is easily biodegradable but difficult to process and too expensive to compete with plastics on its own. The second material is a biodegradable plastic polymer that’s cheap and makes the blend easier to process at scale using industrial equipment. The third component consists of fine-grained wood particles that the team uses to further lower the cost of the mix and to tune the final product as to strength and flexibility (by adjustments in the percentage of added wood particles).
Second place prize: PETTIGREW…
…took a different approach to the plastic waste problem. Various methods have been used to quicken the decomposition of plastics after they’re used and collected. Unfortunately, the vast majority of plastics aren’t collected for recycling at all.
“Some of these plastics take 1,000 years to degrade on their own, which can have consequences including plastic island formation in the ocean,” said PETTIGREW team member Leonardo Zornberg, a PhD candidate.
With these problems in mind, PETTIGREW decided to incorporate decomposition-causing bacteria into plastics as they’re being produced. When the bacteria they selected, Bacillus subtilis, is combined with a sugar filler, it can survive the high temperatures used to shape many plastics.
The team also found the addition of the bacteria had only a minimal effect on the strength and flexibility of the plastics in some cases.
Zornberg acknowledged the potential for pushback from people hesitant to use plastics with living bacteria inside of them, but he noted the bacterial strain his team selected is frequently used to make probiotics for humans, livestock, and agricultural supplements.
Going forward, the team believes genetically engineering the bacteria could further enhance its degradation capabilities, and could even give it other abilities like self-cleaning and antimicrobial defenses.
“One of the reasons we chose Bacillus is it’s a model organism,” Zornberg told MIT News. “It’s very well-understood how to genetically engineer and modify its strains, and it’s used in industrial-scale enzyme production, so both of these things suggest it would be suitable if we wanted to modify the bacteria for future applications.”
About the contest: MADMEC…
…is a prototyping contest revolving around materials solutions to sustainability challenges. MADMEC teams have won the MassChallenge, the MIT 100K, the Clean Energy Prize, the Intel Make it Wearable competition, and NSF-SBIR grants. At least six startups have their roots in the competition.
.
Mascot for the MADMEC competition at MIT
This summary is based on the following sources:
MIT News
MADMEC teams address plastic waste problem with materials science
https://news.mit.edu/2019/madmec-plastic-1017
MADMEC website
https://madmec.mit.edu/
The post Top two prizes in MIT competition awarded for alternatives to nondegradable plastics appeared first on Revolution-Green.