How to produce Perfect Plastic ?

Memorial University Scientists say carbon dioxide has the solution.

Devastating effects of plastic on Environment

The damage to the environment by plastic use needs to be controlled.The biggest problem with this is that once they have been soiled the end up in the trash, which then ends up in the landfill or burned. Either solution is very poor for the environment. Burning emits toxic gases that harm the atmosphere and increase the level of VOCs in the air while landfills hold them indefinitely as part of the plastic waste problem throughout the globe.

Marine debris that was washed ashore covers a beach on Laysan 

Island in the Hawaiian Islands National Wildlife Refuge.

It has been estimated that one bag has the potential to unintentionally kill one animal per every three months due to unintentional digestion or inhalation. If you consider the number of littered plastic bags ranges from 1.5 million to 3 million depending on location, this equals a lot of ecosystem sustaining lives lost.

Burning of plastic

Without the balance of the ecosystem food sources dry up and starvation occurs. With an increase in plastic bag use throughout the world, the eventual effects could be literally devastating even to the human population.

How MUN researchers are working toward a biodegradable plastic.

This purified polymer could be cast into a film used to make an 
environmentally friendly alternative to plastic bags.

With the provincial government continuing its research on the possibility of banning single-use plastic bags, graduate students in chemistry at Memorial University are researching new materials that would make bags biodegradable.

Kori Andrea says it would likely be difficult to ban plastics altogether, but she's part of a team of researchers working to create a better, more environmentally friendly alternative that would break down at the end of its life.

Andrea said she's using the carbon dioxide abundant in the environment as the basis for new biodegradable materials.

"What we're looking at is being able to take carbon dioxide and actually use it as a starting material in these polymers or plastics that we're making," she said.

"We're taking carbon dioxide, we're reacting it with another starting material called epoxides, and then making these alternating polycarbonates, and these are your plastics."

Reactions with carbon dioxide are done at high pressure and 
yield this material. Some trapped carbon dioxide can be seen 
in bubbles. (Kori Andrea/Submitted)

Andrea said many plastic materials now in use are made from petroleum products, which are built with carbon-hydrogen bonds and don't easily decompose.

"It's hard to break down because if you think of the organisms and bacteria in the environment today, they don't have to break down bonds like that, so of course, everything bio-accumulates over time," she said.

"With incorporating carbonate linkages, these carbon-oxygen bonds in our materials, there are bacteria out there that are capable of breaking these things down."

Modifying materials

It's a case of "Mother Nature knows best," Andrea said, using raw materials that fit with natural processes.

Andrea said some of these biodegradable plastic-like materials are already being made by companies in the United States and the United Kingdom, but they have drawbacks.

She said she and other researchers at MUN are modifying the materials they are making to make them more heat-resistant for things like lids for paper coffee cups, or to have different densities to mimic different pre-existing materials.

"We're looking at taking our materials and alternating them one way or another — can we make something similar to a plastic wrap that's very flexible? Can we make something similar to what milk jugs are made of that's a bit more durable?" said Andrea.

"We have recently found some different ways to modify them and start to really change their melting points or their durability. We are getting there. We're still at the fundamental stage and the development on the lab scale."

Scaling up

The challenge now, she said, is to make these products on a large scale with existing technologies and equipment.

Andrea said high pressure is needed to make the carbon dioxide react, so she's designing catalysts to make those reactions occur without high pressures or temperatures.

But it's hard to know what the end products will cost until they are scaled up to produce larger quantities.

"Can we make them? Yes. Can we make them cheaper than the processes that have been optimised for 50-plus years? I don't think we're there yet," she said.

"But will we get there? I think we definitely will."

Is it not cool that Carbon dioxide, a commonly known hazardous gas can be used to balance ecosystem ?

Comment below and share your thoughts.

Reference: https://bit.ly/2TnBfxC

Can a small lump of iron (unearthed in Turkey) will cause a paradigm shift in the chapter of Metallurgy's origin ?

Ancient iron-making included iron products processed from iron meteorites ?

The oldest-class ironmaking-related relic found in the Kaman Kalehoyuk ruins in the Anatolia region of Turkey (Provided by the Japanese Institute of Anatolian Archaeology)

A small lump of iron found in ancient ruins in Turkey may upend commonly held beliefs about the history of ironmaking, as the relic appears to have come from somewhere else.

The question is, where?

A Japanese research team uncovered the oldest ironmaking-related relic of its class at an excavation site in the Anatolia region, the central area of the Hittite Empire (1,400 B.C.-1,200 B.C.).

The empire was a major power along with the New Kingdom of Egypt in the ancient Orient.

The relic is a weight-shaped lump with a diameter of about 3 centimeters and contains a high amount of oxidized iron.

The Japanese Institute of Anatolian Archaeology (JIAA) of the Middle Eastern Culture Center in Japan (MECCJ) discovered it in September 2017 in a geological layer dating between 2,500 B.C. and 2,250 B.C.

The institute has been engaged in research into the Kaman Kalehoyuk ruins in Turkey since 1986.

The ruins are in the central area of the Hittite Empire that prospered in the ancient Orient by using iron and light tanks as weapons.

The empire is said to have acquired military advantages by adopting ironmaking invented by indigenous people. In those days, ironmaking was considered the most advanced technology.

After the empire collapsed, the ironmaking technology spread to surrounding regions, and the proliferation became a turning point toward the Iron Age.

According to JIAA director Sachihiro Omura, the unearthed relic is believed to be the oldest of its kind in the history of ironmaking.

Traces of buildings from more than 4,000 years ago, seen from above, found at the Kaman Kalehoyuk ruins in the Anatolia region of Turkey. Wooden materials that served as the foundation for the structures are set in the reddish-brown scorched soil layer. The holes are believed to have been used for storage. (Provided by the Japanese Institute of Anatolian Archaeology) 

It has been commonly believed that ironmaking originated in the Anatolia region. However, the institute's analysis of the relic showed that it was produced in a different area and brought into the region.

Iron products from the early period of the history of ironmaking include those processed from iron meteorites.

The institute thus asked Takafumi Matsui, professor emeritus of comparative planetology at the University of Tokyo, to analyze the relic.

Taking advantage of the world's most advanced technologies in microfabrication and precision analysis used to look into fine particles brought back from the Itokawa asteroid in 2010 by the Hayabusa space probe, the analysis examined cross-section surfaces of iron compound particles with a diameter of about 0.1 millimeter that the relic was composed of. The results showed that the composition of the particles differed from that of iron meteorites.

As the analysis showed a composition of concentric circles that appear when heat was artificially applied, it was determined that humans produced the lump from iron ore using fire.

Sachihiro Omura stands next to a scorched soil layer (reddish-brown part), which was newly found in the Kaman Kalehoyuk ruins in the Anatolia region of Turkey, in August 2017. The oldest-class ironmaking-related relic was found just above the layer. (Provided by the Japanese Institute of Anatolian Archaeology) 

The analysis also looked into the composition of a small amount of lead in the relic, and then found that the proportion of isotopes was different from that of iron ore widely produced in the region.

Based on the results of the analysis, Matsui said: "The lump is probably a semi-manufactured product processed from iron ore to the middle stage. Someone likely brought it from a distant region."

The team unearthed several similar lumps found just above a 1-meter-thick scorched soil layer about 12 meters beneath the ground's surface.

Traces of buildings found in the same geological layer as the lumps showed that people dug into the scorched soil, constructed foundations for the buildings by installing wooden materials and made walls of mud.

The scene of excavation at the Kaman Kalehoyuk ruins in the Anatolia region of Turkey in September 2017 (Provided by the Japanese Institute of Anatolian Archaeology)

The construction style differed from that of the region, which mainly uses sun-dried bricks.

"It shows that an ancient city that existed there was destroyed on a large scale, and then a group of people came to the area, which was swept up by flames, from the north," Omura surmised.

He added that at the time, ironmaking technologies of the initial period were likely brought to the area simultaneously.

"By making further comparisons with iron ore of other regions, we'd like to figure out where ironmaking originated and clarify the key role played by Anatolia in the arrival of the Iron Age," he said.

Tatsundo Koizumi, representative of the Institute for Archaeological Education of Mesopotamia, said, “It's an extremely important discovery that has a big impact, as it proposes a shift in the common sense of world history put forth by European and U.S. authorities.”

The challenges, he added, are to pinpoint the place of origin of the lumps and clarify how ironmaking spread and developed in Anatolia.

“To determine who invaded the region and left the scorched soil, it is necessary to gather more knowledge about various regions in a careful manner," he added.

Reference: https://bit.ly/2HJoNGP

Relation between Material Science and Ice-Skating is "COOL".

Physical Chemistry explains the slippery nature of Ice. 

The low friction of ice is why speedskaters can reach 35 mph, why figure skaters can twirl in dizzying circles, and why a 40-pound curling stone can glide and accomplish whatever the heck the point of curling is.

But for much of the past two centuries, scientists have struggled to explain why, exactly, ice is slippery — and why skates can glide atop it so well (or for that matter why it’s so easy to slip walking on ice).

One obstacle: Skates on ice are surprisingly hard to study. You can’t see what’s happening when a blade is cutting through the ice because the blade obscures the view. And the ice layers that skates glide on are microscopically thin.

So scientists have to rely on their knowledge of physics and chemistry for an explanation. They’ve come up with a few overlapping ones that each elucidate a fascinating property of ice. Given that winter cold has settled over the Northern Hemisphere, it’s a good time to dig in.

Ice is solid water. You know that. But what happens when it becomes a solid makes this substance unusual and fascinating.

For most substances in the universe, the solid phase is denser than the liquid phase. When a material is cooled enough to form solids, its molecules get bonded in tight arrays. But ice is different. When it drops below 32°F, the special hydrogen bonds that link water molecules together force additional space between the water molecules when they freeze.

On the left, molecules of liquid water are disorganised and dense. 

On the right, molecules of ice are orderly and spread out.

And it turns out you can fine tune ice to benefit athletes in different sports.

As Smithsonian Magazine explains, the ice used in rinks in the Olympic ice is purified water, sprayed on rinks one layer at a time to create surfaces of flawless consistency. The thickness and temperature of the ice in the Olympics depends on the sport. Figure skaters prefer ice set close to the melting point at 25°F for extra grip and control. Hockey players like a colder, harder, and ultimately faster surface.

Solid ice is actually less dense than liquid water (this is why icebergs float in the ocean). And for scientists, this was a clue to figuring out why ice is so darn slippery.

Hypothesis 1: Pressure melts ice. (This is mostly wrong. But still interesting.)

Since the 19th century, the most common answer to the question of “why is ice slippery” has been “because ice melts under pressure.”

This idea draws from the work of James Thompson, who in the 1850s worked out the math that describes a very strange property of ice: That is, under high pressure, ice turns back into water. This is due to the fact, again, that solid ice is less dense than water. If you squeeze ice, it becomes less stable and melts.

You can demonstrate this effect with a very simple experiment. Take a length of wire and tie a weight to each end. Then lay the wire across a large block of ice. The pressure of the wire will cut a clean line through the ice (which will freeze back together once the wire passes through, a process called “regelation”). Watch this video: https://youtu.be/1iIv1SuS164

It’s tempting to think this is how ice skates work — that the pressure exerted by the thin blade on the ice melts enough water to reduce the friction and allow for gliding.

But here’s the problem: “You’d have to be an incredibly massive person in order to melt ice sufficiently to be able to skate at any reasonable temperature,” David Limmer, a theoretical chemistry professor at UC Berkeley, said in an interview last year.

As the New York Times’s Kenneth Chang has explained, a 150-pound person standing on blades would only lower the melting point of ice from 32°F to 31.97° F., while ice rinks for figure skating are commonly kept around 24°F. Simply put: Skaters can’t exert enough pressure to melt the ice.

“So while the basic idea is correct — you can melt ice by pressurizing it — the numbers don’t work out at all,” Limmer says. (One paper explains if the ice is a very cold -4°F, it would take a pressure of 39,680 psi to melt enough to allow for skating. That’s more than double the pressure found at the bottom of the ocean! And yet it’s still possible to skate on ice that cold.)

Also, pressure melting doesn’t happen instantaneously, as you can see in the video above. “So it’s inconceivable that in the millisecond that a skater spends when on a certain spot on the ice, one can simply, by pressure, melt a layer of water,” Hans van Leeuwen, a retired professor of theoretical physics who has recently published a mathematical explanation of ice skating, said.

Hypothesis 2: Friction melts the ice. (Getting warmer. But it doesn’t explain everything.)

So the pressure of a thin blade on ice cannot explain why skates glide. But what about friction? Can’t the sliding motion of ice skates on the surface generate enough heat to melt the ice?

This is definitely part of the answer, but it doesn’t explain why ice is so unusually slippery to begin with. Anyone who’s walked on a slick sidewalk knows you can slip on ice the second your foot touches it. And that’s not enough time to generate the friction necessary to melt a film of water.

Friction “is a second-order effect” in the ice skating problem, Limmer explains. Friction helps us understand why ice skates can glide faster and faster when moving, but not why they can get started in the first place.

Hypothesis 3: There’s a very small layer of liquid water on top of ice. (This is key.)

A few years before James Thompson explained why pressure melts ice, physicist Michael Faraday discovered another fascinating property of ice: the thin, liquid layer on its surface. His experiment was so simple you can do it at home.

Take two ice cubes in your freezer, and very quickly — so as to not heat any part of them to their melting point — stack them on top of each another.

Come back a few hours later. They’re stuck together.

Faraday (correctly) guessed that the ice cubes stick together because of the liquid layer surrounding them. When these liquid layers meet, they freeze together.

This very thin liquid layer also makes ice extra smooth. But Faraday couldn’t prove his hypothesis at the time. The science of atoms and molecules was not yet available to aid in the explanation.

In 1987, scientists verified the existence of this “quasi-liquid” layer with X-ray imaging. And it’s super, super thin. The best estimates find its thickness at -1°C (30.2°F) is between 1 nanometer and 94 nanometers. That’s about 1,000 times smaller than a bacteria. More recently, scientists have actually seen the liquid surface using extremely sensitive microscopes.

diagram showing what’s happening on a molecular scale.

When water is frozen, the individual water molecules grab each other via hydrogen bonds, holding one another in place in a crystalline structure, as you can see in the lower half of the figure. But the molecules on the surface have fewer other molecules to cling to, which makes them more disorganized — and ultimately makes the ice slippery.

To summarise with

So what happens when an ice skate made from aluminum or steel touches the ice?

Van Leeuwen explains that the tiny liquid layer is the reason why skates can start moving instantaneously on ice. And as the blades move faster and faster through the ice, more friction is generated, which melts more water. As the skater propels forward, she physically plows through the ice, deforming it. This causes more friction, and more melting. All this allows skaters to glide, hydroplane-like, on a thin, thin film of water in a channel they carve. And this all happens in an instant.

Again, all this would be a very hard thing to see firsthand in an experiment. “The thickness of the layer of water is so small that you can’t distinguish it from the ice,” Van Leeuwen says. So it stands as a hypothesis for now.

But interestingly, Van Leeuwen estimates it would be very hard to skate at temperatures below -30°C. Even though there would still be a tiny liquid layer on the ice, it would take too much friction to generate enough heat to melt anything else. Also, below this temperature, the tiny liquid layer on top of ice becomes harder and harder to detect. It would be like skating on gravel. (Though why in the world you would want to go skating at -22°F is beyond me.)

What else can we skate on?

Okay. Case closed. But I was left wondering: Are there any other surfaces we could skate on? As Limmer explains, “basically all solids” will form a tiny liquid layer “when they are close to their melting temperature.”

Mercury freezes at -37.89°F. It would take far too much energy to keep a rink of mercury that cold. Plus, mercury is a potent neurotoxin.

What about gallium? It’s a metal that melts at 85.58°F — a little hot for a skating rink. But just imagine skaters doing triple axels on a silvery mirror gallium surface. “That sounds like a wonderful idea,” Limmer says. (Just make sure your skates aren’t made out of aluminum!When aluminum interacts with gallium it becomes very brittle.)

Though solid gallium would be more slippery near its melting point, would it be slippery enough for ice skating? Or easy enough to plow through? There’s only one way to find out.

Reference: https://bit.ly/2UWxDEb

Exploring Relations of Extraterrestrial Life and New Materials

Self-repairing or re-configuring of Satellites with respect to flight conditions are the fruitful results of development and innovations in the field of Material Science.

A thought provoking post by Thierry Belmonte, director of the Jean Lamour Institute Entitled "Matters to think".

From the atom to the material, chemistry gives material (s) to think. Whether dealing with nano-medicines, mobile phones, hydrogen vehicles or the use of biomass, chemists are exploring new avenues taking into account environmental and societal issues. A smartphone can, thanks to the new materials it contains, serve as a phone, but also a camera or calculator for gamer, much more powerful than those embedded on lunar missions, generations of satellites to come will be able to benefit from new features. There are three strong trends in this area: self-parability, adaptability and multi-functionality.

A system is self-repairing when it has the ability to autonomously return to an initial, fault-free and fully operational situation. This is after a change of procedure but without external effect, additional material or energy dissipation at the damaged location.

Materials - Their Intelligence

Adaptability makes it possible to reconfigure a system to other operating regimes or to other environments using little time, energy and material. The Space Shuttle was the first vehicle to evolve in both the Earth's atmosphere and space. A few years ago, we also saw flying boats coming out of the water when conditions permit, moving from a conventional navigation mode to a lift mode that limits friction. 

View of the solar panels of the BepiColombo probe en route to Mercury (Credit: ESA / BepiColombo / MTM)

The ability of a complex system to perform multiple tasks based on different physical principles defines multifunctionality. This has the major advantage of dramatically decreasing the mass and energy consumption of spacecraft. For example, solar cells, which could also be used as solar sails while providing effective protection against radiation.

 These different functionalities require "dynamic" materials, that is to say, capable of modifying their surface and volume properties, either spontaneously or under the effect of an external stimulus that will be desired as low as possible. . If the self-parability of metals, also able to recover the memory of their original form, has already been demonstrated, we now know that it is possible to find this property in so-called "intelligent" materials based on graphene. This applies particularly in micro and nanoelectronics, as it is true that today embedded devices are an essential element of any space activity.

Reference: https://bit.ly/2HqOz2L

The material science of building a light sail to take us to Alpha Centauri

We're unsure about the best material and don't have the measurements to know.

It has been about two years since Yuri Milner announced his most audacious piece of science-focused philanthropy: Breakthrough Starshot, an attempt to send hardware to Alpha Centauri by mid-century. Although the technology involved is a reasonable extrapolation of things we already know how to make, being able to create materials and technology that create that extrapolation is a serious challenge. So much of Breakthrough Starshot's early funding has gone to figuring out what improvements on current technology are needed.

Perhaps the least well-understood developments we need come in the form of the light sail that will be needed to accelerate the starshots to 20 percent of the speed of light. We've only put two examples of light-driven sails into space, and they aren't anything close to what is necessary for Breakthrough Starshot. So, in this week's edition of Nature Materials, a team of Caltech scientists looks at what we'd need to do to go from those examples to something capable of interstellar travel.

The size of the problem

One of our best examples of a light sail was put into space on the IKAROS craft, which was capable of accelerating up to speeds of 400 meters/second. Breakthrough Starshot's craft are expected to travel in the area of 60,000 kilometers/second and accelerate to that speed before leaving the Solar System. So the amount we can learn from the existing craft is fairly limited.

Those speeds—and the acceleration needed to get there—provide a rough idea of the size of the sail we'd need, and the dimensions are pretty impressive: 10 square meters but weighing less than a gram. That, the Caltech researchers calculate, means that the sail will have to average out to being 100 atoms thick yet still be able to transmit the force of acceleration. Graphene is one of the strongest materials we're aware of, so it might work for Breakthrough, but it's also transparent at some wavelengths and absorbs at many others, so it can only act as structural support.

There is some good news in that 100-atom-thick figure. The sail will run into a variety of energetic particles in the interplanetary and interstellar medium, but most of these will be hydrogen and helium. And, based on how deeply those particles penetrate into other materials, there's a good chance that the hydrogen and helium will pass straight through the solar sail. Dust particles create more of a problem, but the authors estimate that they would obliterate about 0.1 percent of the total sail area, and most of that would occur after the acceleration has been completed.

So what we're left with is primarily the challenge of building the material that will reflect light from the solar sail. Or, as we'll see, the collection of interlocking challenges.

Sailing

Light sails work because photons carry momentum, and they'll impart a bit of that to reflective surfaces as they bounce off. Starshot proposes to sync up a large collection of lasers on Earth and focus this on the light sail in order to accelerate it rapidly. That means the lasers will have to be at a wavelength that can pass through the atmosphere without being absorbed or scattered; the authors suggest that the near-infrared (with a one- or two-micrometer wavelength) would be a good choice.

So the sail surface would have to reflect in those wavelengths. Gold and silver, among other metals, are already known to do so and can be made in thin films. Problem solved, right?

Not exactly. As the authors note, managing light isn't just a matter of tackling the problem of reflecting light; it's a series of interlinked problems. Even if we could make thin films of these metals a few atoms thick on a sail, the relatively high weight per-atom means that we could easily blow past the sail's weight limit. And, even more problematic, while these metals reflect most of the light in these wavelengths, a lot of what doesn't get reflected is absorbed. At the intensity of the lasers involved in accelerating the craft, the heat from those absorbed photons would quickly destroy the sail.

Instead, the authors look into partly reflective materials that have a high refractive index and low absorption. The high refraction allows for the possibility of making light-manipulating structures on the surface of the sail that contribute to its reflectivity. The researchers consider a handful of semiconducting materials that fit the bill, rejecting a number of them because their component atoms weigh too much (like tin). The reflection/refraction of these materials also have to cover a broad range of wavelengths since, once the craft is moving fast enough, the incoming photons will be red-shifted.

In the end, nothing meets the researchers' full list of desires. So they settled for two out of three and focus on silicon, diamond, and molybdenum disulfide.

There are other issues, however. These materials also have to efficiently radiate away any heat they do wind up with—technically, they have to have a high emissivity. This will obviously cause problems with, as the researchers put it, "melting or other thermal failure modes." But it can cause problems even below that. As silicon heats up, the amount of light it absorbs will increase, creating the prospect of a thermal runaway.

Right now, the team suggests that we don't even have good measurements of some of the material properties that we'd need to fully evaluate some of these details. We've got measurements of bulk material, but not thin films. So there's an entire research field that has to be advanced for us to fully understand the tradeoffs we face.

Structure

While materials like silicon won't reflect much of the light, they have a high refractive index, which means they will bend a lot of it. If you structure the surfaces of these materials on scales similar to the wavelength of the incoming light, they can potentially bend it in a way that is functionally equivalent to reflecting it. So, the researchers also considered a variety of designs for the surface.

And here they found yet another trade-off. While the best light reflection (nearly perfect reflection) came with a multi-layered, 3D structure, that added significantly to the weight. By contrast, they weren't able to reflect as much light using a pattern of holes drilled into the silicon, but this significantly lowered the weight. When they compared the acceleration of the two options, they were able to get a noticeably larger acceleration from the less-efficient solution purely due to the weight.

Adding to the challenges they face, the sail itself won't be a simple flat sheet. That's because even the slightest imperfections on the surface or tilt of a sheet could send it off in unexpected directions during acceleration. Instead, current thinking focuses on a spherical sail and a donut-shaped light field, which could self-correct for small perturbations in the sail. That design, however, probably isn't conducive to making the sail from single sheets of material (assuming we could figure out how to grow them at scales of 10 square meters). So we're going to have to bond many individual panels of these materials together, something that we don't currently know how to do.

Overall, the paper does a good job of laying out what we'd need to know to start choosing materials for a Breakthrough light sail. But it also highlights that this isn't a matter of finding the one perfect solution; instead, it's about managing multiple, sometimes conflicting priorities and engineering a solution that partially satisfies all of them. "We argue that a successful design of the light sail will require synergetic engineering," the authors conclude, "simultaneous optimization and consideration of all of the parameters described above."

Reference: https://bit.ly/2TWoUEM

What are the five innovations in material science needed to cut plastic waste?


Scenes of plastic-sullied oceans on the BBC's Blue Planet II may have prompted consumers, governments and retailers to pledge new approaches to packaging.

But the challenge of how to fulfil those pledges remains unresolved.

Today the World Economic Forum in Davos presented with a list of five innovations in materials science that may be part of the answer.

That's according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which is pursuing solutions to the scourge of plastic waste.

At the last annual gathering of the world's movers and shakers in the Swiss ski resort, former round-the-world yachtswoman Dame Ellen Mac Aurthur launched her New Plastics Initiative. It challenges innovators, engineers, businesses and policymakers to find ways of reducing our addiction to plastic.

The first £1m of award money was granted late last year to design innovations intended to reduce the 30% of unrecycled waste plastic that comes from small items such as bottle lids and food sachets. Winners included the creators of edible spice sachets made from seaweed and origami coffee cups that do not require plastic lids.

This year, with plastic pollution higher than ever on the agenda, her organisation, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, has identified five projects developing new materials that could change the way we package our food. The five will share funding of a further £1m.

Scientists experimenting with bio-based materials are aiming to come up with fully compostable and recyclable packaging

Dame Ellen said the innovations on the list offered a way to tackle "the root causes of the problem - not just the symptoms".

Among the innovations are ways to replace multi-layered packaging materials that perform a variety of tasks - such as keeping food dry, dark and moist - and which supermarkets say are indispensable in the battle against food waste.

Aronax Technologies in Spain has devised magnetic platelets that can be added to packaging materials to make them perform like airtight aluminium coatings that are commonly used to keep crisps dry and crunchy, or stop toothpaste from drying out.

They can be added to compostable and recyclable plastics and because they are magnetic could even be reclaimed during the recycling process and reused.

A polyethylene nano-engineered by scientists at the University of Pittsburgh can mimic properties of other materials including aluminium. That would mean packaging made from polyethylene that performs like a mixture of materials, but be much simpler to recycle.

Others on the winning list include projects to make coatings from food waste that are fully compostable, with the added benefit of keeping the food waste out of landfill.

The VTT Technical Research Centre in Finland has created a cellulose wrapper that looks like transparent plastic but can be made from wood, rice straw or sugar cane tops. Usually the drawback with cellulose is sensitivity to moisture, but VTT has come up with a cellulose film with superior barrier properties.

Finnish scientists are making cellulose packaging from wood

The Fraunhofer Institute for Silicate Research has also come with biodegradable coatings with powerful barrier properties that can be made from fruit residues and other waste materials.

Dame Ellen said the innovations were a starting point for shifting away from depending on plastics: "To get there will require new levels of commitment and collaboration from industry, governments, designers and startups. I hope these innovations will inspire even more progress, helping to build a system in which all plastic materials are reused, recycled or safely composted."

The French government has pledged to recycle all plastics by 2025 and 11 companies including L'Oreal, Mars, Evian, Coca-Cola, Unilever and Walmart have also vowed to work towards using 100% reusable, recyclable or compostable packaging by then.

Paul Polman, chief executive of Unilever, welcomed the commitments by other companies but said the consumer goods industry needed to "go much further, much faster" in cutting consumption of single-use plastics.

Share your ideas on "How to curb the use of plastics ?"

Reference: https://bbc.in/2u4oBZU