The Plastic Alchemist
Article By Helen Lovell-Wayne, MS
Picture By Gokalp Iscan
https://www.linkedin.com/in/helen-lovell-wayne/
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hlovell@gmail.com
This paper was written with the sole intention of informing consumers about the goods they may currently be buying. Hopefully, with enough demand from consumers, industries will supply safer and more sustainable products.
Plastic is a petroleum product and its presence as a “forever” waste polluting our water and soil has the public increasingly concerned (V. Khyade 2018). Social media is full of Julian Brown and his microwave pyrolysis “invention”. The idea behind his contraption is to turn plastic back into the oil that it is composed of. Julian Brown is making this idea mainstream, and the public is, for the most part, on board with his products, “plasoline and plasodiesal”. However, there are other ways of breaking down plastic, and pyrolysis is not the ideal solution that the public is craving.
Hydrothermal, catalytic cracking, and pyrolysis are all processes that turn plastic into oil. They all work on the same basic premise. The plastic is heated up until it breaks into its component parts. This results in the formation of a combination of solids, liquids, and gases. The liquids are then able to be utilized as gasoline. However, the gases and some of the solids and liquids resulting from this procedure can be toxic(N. Shah, Rockwell, J. and Huffman, G. 1998). Some of these processes aim to minimize this toxicity (M. Ozoemena and Coles, S. 2023).
💡Plastic Eating Worms💡
In doing so, they utilize energy; in all cases, the energy to create the product is more than the energy produced (N. Shah, Rockwell, J. and Huffman, G. 1998). Even with using catalysts to reduce the initial temperature needed, these three processes end up with a net loss, at this point in our technological knowledge (N. Shah, Rockwell, J. and Huffman, G. 1998).A solution that is not getting the same notoriety as the above-mentioned processes comes from nature.
Scientists at Arkansas State University in collaboration with NASA are studying waxworms that eat and digest plastic (V. Khyade 2018). The plastic is broken down into harmless ethylene glycol without excessive heat or energy (V. Khyade 2018). Additionally, ethylene glycol is harmless and biodegrades easily (V. Khyade 2018).The “normal” food for waxworms is the wax from beehives. So they are considered a parasite. Breeding waxworms to eat plastic would most likely cause other ecological problems.
🧫Other Plastic Methods🦠
So scientists are isolating two strains of bacteria Enterobacter asburiae and Bacillus sp found in the guts of worms that cause plastic to be decomposed (V. Khyade 2018). These bacteria could then be used in landfills to reduce the decomposition time of plastics. Another worm with similar capabilities is being studied in Japan and Australia (S. George, George, A. and Martin, A. 2022).There are other methods currently being studied, including other types of naturally occurring bacteria.
These are naturally occurring bacteria are not found in the guts of worms that decompose plastic. One type of bacteria that is currently being studied is called Ideonella sakaeinsis (S. Kaur, Singh, Z. and Singh, B. 2024). Its primary source of energy comes from plastic. It breaks it down into ethylene glycol (EG) and terephthalic acid (S. Kaur, Singh, Z. and Singh, B. 2024). This acid can cause eye irritation and coughing, but it is far less harmful than the carcinogenic gases, liquids, and solids produced by the three heat-based processes mentioned earlier in this article.
The biggest drawback is that this bacteria only eats one type of plastic: PET (plyethethlene terephthalate) (S. Kaur, Singh, Z. and Singh, B. 2024). These plastics are marked as 1 in a triangle on the base of beverage bottles (S. Kaur, Singh, Z. and Singh, B. 2024).Currently, there is room for all the types of plastic “recycling” I have mentioned. Mostly because a natural means of breaking down plastic has not been discovered for all types of plastic.
🥥Plastic Consumer Behavior🎋
Until that is discovered than there is room for hydrothermal, catalytic cracking, and pyrolysis on a limited basis until they can be replaced with more efficient nontoxic mechanisms. These processes should be regarded as a stopgap method. In the meantime, as a consumer, the main thing you can do is use less plastic. For more information about reducing plastic waste, read Garbage Talk, 2025, and/or Microplastics-It’s What’s On The Menu. If you can’t avoid it is use plastic created from hemp, seaweed, coconut, and/or bamboo.
These plastics are called bioplastics. The consumer can usually determine that they are buying bioplastics by looking at the triangle with the recycling arrows. If there is a number 7 then it is considered plant-based or compostable. These products can usually decompose in less than 6 months and are currently commercially available. That way, we are not causing more plastic environmental problems. Hopefully, in the near future, plastic will not be forever but more or something fleeting like a summer’s day.