A Tour of a Modern Plastics Research Lab
with Dr. John Misasi
It was a beautiful fall day on the campus of Western Washington University when five members of Protect Henderson Inlet converged on the Ross Engineering Technology building for a unique tour. We were to meet Dr. John Misasi, Associate Professor of Polymer Materials Engineering, who runs the only undergraduate program of its kind on the West Coast. Dr. Misasi is responsible for the training of 24 undergraduate students in plastics engineering and focuses on sustainability and recycling. We were invited from our non-profit group to learn more about how experts in plastic technology are advancing techniques for making plastics safer, more practical, and more recyclable.
Western Washington University
It is hard to imagine a world without plastics. We have become dependent on them for virtually everything we do, yet we do have to live with the negative impact of chemical additives and the physical impact of plastic waste on the environment. We were thrilled to gain a better understanding of what his lab is doing to help the environment and to help industry to be cleaner and more efficient.
Plastics were invented in the 1940s but only made it into consumer products in the 50s and 60s. From the sixties until recently, plastics, also known as polymers, have been created pretty much the same, but today’s methods strive to be environmentally better. Polymers are built from individual building blocks called monomers formed from the chemical ethylene, which is usually obtained from natural gas or oil but can be made from organic products. One company, Braskem, makes plastics from plant products. Their “I’m Green” brand makes plastic products using sugarcane while capturing CO2 from the atmosphere.
Two basic categories of plastic materials are thermoplastics, generally used for softer items with less durability, and thermoset polymers, which are structurally stronger and denser, especially on the surface, and therefore much harder to break down. Some examples of thermoplastics are plastic drink bottles, shower curtains, and most aquaculture gear, including oyster bags. Thermoset plastics include oven knobs, polycarbonate windows, and fiberglass boats. The highest use of plastic materials at the present time is in making rubber, clothes, and aquaculture nets.
To develop the physical characteristics needed for an individual plastic item, numerous additives are included during manufacture to bring out beneficial physical properties such as flexibility, durability, color, or strength. However, the loss of these chemical components to the environment can produce a severe negative impact, so it is important to understand which additives are toxic and which are safer for humans and animals. Examples of commonly used additives in plastics are phthalates, Bisphenol A (BPA), UV stabilizers, and Vitamin E. Dr. Misasi brought to our attention that the BPA liners in aluminum cans release polymers (polyethylene)! He mentioned that plastics are especially worrisome to the scientific community because they lead to antibiotic resistance.
Dr. Misasi showed us a few items his students had collected from intensive cleanups (60,000 lbs. of plastics were collected this summer in just seven days) along the shores of Alaskan beaches. They shipped the material south in vessels returning from deliveries in Alaska with empty hold space. As a result of their work over the past several summers, the students, who are concerned about our plastics-waste crisis, have proven that all the collected pieces can be recycled. They’ve partnered with Denton Plastic Recycling in Portland, which manages to keep everything out of landfills, and with the tech giant HP, which aims to get more recycled content into their products. “Building these pathways – from beaches back to companies for re-use is what our work is all about,” said Misasi.
Recycling is not simple, though, and the work at WWU continues to evolve. Students study pieces they’ve collected, in their various degrees of degradation, to figure out how they can be broken down, mixed, and recombined into new compounds just as good – or better- than their original form. Dr. Misasi showed us a piece of old crab line that was ground up, cleaned, and made into pellets, and finally used to make such things as crab gauges, molds for which were on display. He showed us the extruder machine used in the process. He explained that plastics going through it have a consistency like peanut butter going through a straw. In the middle, vacuums remove old chemical additives, which are captured and delivered to hazardous waste recovery. New additives can be added later in the process. Finally, to ensure purity, filters screen out things like sand and barnacles.
We saw the equipment used for reducing the size of waste plastic, which is necessary before it can be processed into new material. These tools are basically shredders that sequentially reduce the material into smaller and smaller particles. This equipment understandably has many safety guards and other safety precautions. The larger size reducer came into being during the COVID-19 shutdown of classes when designing the machine became a virtual engineering project. When in-person classes restarted, the design was built into the very useful machine we viewed. These machines were intended for use in the school’s laboratory work; industrial-size machines in commercial recycling facilities are many times the size of the units we viewed.
It is a challenge to recycle material that has become dirty or degraded in the environment, but there are commercial facilities that can do this. When working with a plastic product such as an exposure-damaged oyster buoy, the degraded part might only be as deep as 1/2 mm. The degraded part can be removed by granulation. This can be thermally recycled as an oil, then eventually as a monomer, and made into plastic again. OSU also has a program focusing on this process known as pyrolysis.
Unfortunately, only about 5% of plastics in the US are recycled overall, but it is encouraging that of the plastics collected at the curbside, about 30-50% do get recycled. Still, that leaves a lot of material in the landfill. To underscore the importance of reducing the amount of these materials, Dr. Misasi told us that since landfills take out 98% of air and water, nothing really degrades, not even banana peels! However, new bacteria are evolving, which are learning to degrade plastics, even in an anaerobic environment. Learning about the enzymes involved can eventually help boost the recycling process.
One example of recycling becoming mainstream in aquaculture is with trawl nets, which can be 300 meters long and often have worn sections that are cut out. The worn sections of fibrous material have historically gone into landfills, but the fishing industry is now more involved with recycling, and some of this damaged material is being remade into new netting. Samson Rope is an example of a company committed to environmentally friendly practices. Their product is favored in fishing for its strength and is also very recyclable.
HDPE (high-density polyethylene) plastics are better for recycling than PVC (polyvinyl chloride). What Dr Misasi sees as possible for recycling HDPE mesh is that each piece can be remade to be as good or better than when it was new and then reused to last 100 to 200 years. He envisions defined endpoints when a product would be returned for remanufacture, and the cost of the remade item would be less than for the same thing made from virgin plastic.
Dr Misasi’s long-range goal is to achieve a plastic product that, when it eventually degrades, actually adds something to the environment. An interim goal is for plastics to become part of a cycle instead of a linear chain of consumption: we should eliminate all problematic and unnecessary plastic items, innovate to ensure that the plastics we do need are reusable, recyclable, or compostable, and circulate all the plastic items we use to keep them in the economy and out of the environment.
Our field trip ended with telling us about how he is designing student projects with Protect Henderson Inlet in mind. He will give them some aquaculture materials and ask how their practical use can be improved environmentally. Extra credit for reaching out to a company that uses the same product he will show in class (a mesh oyster bag and zip ties) will be given.
Dr. Misasi shared the names of several organizations and companies working to help ease plastics’ environmental impact. These include Braskem, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, the Association of Plastic Recyclers, Ocean Plastics Recovery Company, Denton Recyclers, Ocean Legacy Recyclers in Canada, Washington state legislators Rep. Liz Berry and Sen. Christine Rolfes (trying to pass the bottle buy-back campaign), and our federal legislators. Together with the efforts of Misasi and his students, other institutions, these companies, our lawmakers, and everyday citizens, we can be confident it will happen!
In this vintage Tupperware commercial, we’re told these indispensable containers are “available in fresh sun, sky, and sea colors.” Oh! The irony.