plastics

Algae have come a long way in our post-fossil-fuels energy situation: Now the same green scum that covers water and other surfaces could soon be enlisted to make biodegradable green plastics for your picnic cutlery.

Popular Science celebrates the eternal human urge to go bigger! Better! Stronger! Meet three innovations with the need to exceed.

Given the choice, you probably wouldn't risk sailing 11,500 miles from San Francisco to Sydney in a boat handmade of 20,000 plastic water bottles. But David de Rothschild, the founder of the nonprofit educational organization Adventure Ecology, sees such a vessel as the perfect way to "beat waste" by promoting new uses for recycled plastic while dramatizing the problem of ocean debris. Next month, de Rothschild and a crew of scientists will sail the Plastiki, a 60-foot catamaran, to environmental hotspots including Bikini Atoll, the former atomic-bomb testing site, and Tuvalu, an island rapidly disappearing under rising seas.

Plastic. It’s the spring in your tennis shoes, the sheath on your burrito, the skin of your air mattress . . . And, unfortunately, it could also be the hormone disruptor in your endocrine system. This is just one potential danger highlighted in the most recent issue of the journal Environmental Research, which includes a special section showcasing six new studies of the effects of plastics and plastic ingredients on the body and the earth.

Bioplastics, like biofuels, are on the rise as consumers demand alternatives to fossil fuel-based plastics and big business take their wants seriously. Everything from shopping bags to clamshell containers are being reengineered out of bio-based packaging in the hope of finding a truly disposable container; one that, instead of ending up floating in the ocean, will quickly decompose underground. That ideal, as you might expect, is not quite so simple. And already, our two leading alternative bag types are falling short of the hype.

On the heels of our reporting about Canada's probable move to ban BPA plastics comes a story about researchers working at Missouri University of Science and Technology to develop hybrid plastics that would biodegrade in landfills within four months. As our editor Nicole Dyer pointed out in a comment to the BPA post, the larger and more important issue facing plastics is their propensity to stick around forever.

Theres been a lot of talk recently about bisphenol A, or BPA, which is most commonly found in polycarbonate plastics. These are the plastics used in baby bottles and Nalgenes, the kind that are rigid and unlikely to break when dropped. BPA has been found to disrupt the processes of the endocrine system in animals, but it is still unclear what, if any, the effect on humans is. Still, the news today is that the Canadian government is poised to declare the chemical as toxic when used in food and water containers because it leeches out into its containers contents.