Take a quick look around and it’s likely you’ll see plastics in every direction. While they appear to be an inexpensive and ideal material for nearly every purpose, plastics come at a high cost to the environment. Most plastics are byproducts of fossil fuel production, which contributes significantly to CO2 emissions, and plastic waste is impacting oceans, forests, wildlife, and even our own bodies in the form of microplastics. An article published in the Santa Fe New Mexican by Babs Marrone, the I-WEST lead for bioenergy, discusses how bioplastics are key to decarbonizing and addressing the pollution problem. Read the article here.
Interested in learning more about how plastics are produced and what can be done to make them safer for the environment? An article in Los Alamos National Laboratory’s science and technology magazine 1663 explains how scientists are using biology, chemistry, and machine learning to create a process for finding entirely new plastics that are bio-based and biodegradable. Read the article here.
