Manufacturing

Humans generate a lot of plastic waste – more than 400 million metric tons a year. To bring this fact a bit closer to home, the U.S. produced an average of 0.75 pounds (0.34 kilograms) of plastic waste per person each day in 2010, which is equivalent in weight to an unopened can of soda. Plastic products have been propelling our quality of life forward for over a century, from keeping food fresh longer to enhancing medical hygiene and making transportation more energy-efficient. In the meantime, plastic waste has also accumulated. Today it is an unsolved and growing problem of gargantuan proportions. Worldwide, only 9% of plastic waste is recycled – largely through mechanical processing, creating products like drainage pipes – and 19% is incinerated. The rest is either buried in landfills or has escaped into the environment, where it damages ecosystems and harms human health. To address existing and future plastic waste, new approaches beyond mechanical rec...