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Welcome back to Current Climate. Concerns over the health and environmental harms of petroleum-based plastic, particularly over its use in packaging for food, beverages and consumer products, keep rising, and yet there hasn’t been a viable, less-harmful material to replace it. That could change.
In a new scientific study, a group of U.S. researchers has found that a hemp-derived alternative material has both malleability and an ability to stretch that’s on par or superior to conventional plastic, and remains durable even when it comes in contact with boiling hot water. Those qualities make it an attractive alternative to plastic used for packaging. And unlike petroleum-based plastic, there’s no indication of toxicity in soil or water as the hemp-based plastic, which is made from low-grade CBD oil, breaks down, according to Gregory Sotzing, one of the study’s authors and a chemistry professor at the University of Connecticut.
Clinical studies of CBD oils, such as for medications to treat children with epilepsy, don’t show harmful environmental effects, and “when this plastic degrades, it’ll degrade like hemp CBD,” he said. “The CBD will get oxidized over time and naturally degrade in the soil.”
Another upside relative to conventional plastic: recyclability. While very little plastic packaging is actually recycled, a hemp-based version would be fully reusable. “Because this plastic is made of CBD, you could upcycle and sell it, converting it back to CBD oil,” Sotzing said. “You could take this thing and depolymerize it, recollect the CBD, and probably do it cheaper than extracting it directly from a plant. So there’s additional value.”
Scaling up this new plastic won’t happen anytime soon, however, because it will require far greater production of industrial hemp to make it more cost-competitive. Sotzing, who has created a startup called PolyC Plastics and Composites to push for commercial applications of the research, expects the first market for hemp-based plastic to be for things like medical implants, which require pricier, highly durable specialty materials.
“It would start with a higher-end market than plastic bottles. This is brand new stuff,” he said. “But I don’t think anyone else before has demonstrated a high temperature polymer that’s a thermoplastic natural resource that’s also from a non-food source.”
The Big Read
Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images
Advanced Solar Tech Fuels Boosts South Korea’s Jusung Engineering, Minting A New Billionaire
Shares of Jusung Engineering, a little-known industrial equipment maker in South Korea, have soared roughly 80% since mid-April, following reports that it stands to benefit if China restricts exports of solar manufacturing equipment. The stock surge has made Hwang Chul-joo, the company’s founder, chairman and CEO, a billionaire.
With his 26% stake, Hwang, 66, is the largest shareholder of Jusung Engineering, which is listed on South Korea’s technology-rich Kosdaq stock exchange. His wife, Kim Jae-ran, and his son, Eun-seok, hold an additional combined stake of just over 4%. Forbes estimates the net worth of Hwang and his family at $1.1 billion.
Based in the city of Gwangju in Gyeonggi province near Seoul, Jusung Engineering makes equipment for mass production of semiconductors, solar cells and advanced digital displays. Its equipment specializes in thin-film deposition, which is the process of coating thin-film (atomic level) layers of chemicals onto a surface, such as a silicon wafer or glass substrate. The thin layers of chemicals help create the electrical circuits within microchips and maximize the light absorption in solar panels (raw silicon reflects some sunlight).
Hot Topic
Boyen Slat, founder of The Ocean Cleanup, on adding new plastic trash “interceptors” to Southern California waterways and using tech to fight the Great Pacific Garbage Patch
You’re adding two additional trash interceptor barges in the Los Angeles area. These are pretty specialized machines. How much do they cost?
Every river is unique, so it varies. Initial capex per river averages around $300K. The rivers here are bigger than average. The flow speed is very high, so it requires a very heavy-duty type. These will be substantially higher cost, but on average, around the world, it’s like 300K initial investment per river. And then on average, like $100K to operate. Numbers in the U.S., in LA, are higher again.
I see. Your Southern California partners mentioned the cost of this program was $5 million or $6 million.
Doing things here is also a bit more expensive than in places like Indonesia. Labor costs are also higher, and it’s the heavier-duty type of interceptor that we have to deploy. Also, you’ve got all the studies that have to be done and a lot of man-hours involved with the permitting. … That’s probably costing more than the actual hardware.
It’s not a lack of willingness by local government. It’s just the complexity of the system.
Ocean Cleanup started by focusing on cleaning up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, but now also deploys interceptors to catch plastic trash before it gets to the ocean. How do you split those efforts?
We’re working on both and both are key. You can’t solve this without doing one or the other. The thing is that we’re running things slightly more sequentially than we used to just because on the rivers, we’re really ready to scale, the technology’s mature.
So for rivers, it’s all about scaling. In the Pacific, there are still two or three years of R&D required before we can really scale there.
The Patch is not homogeneous, so you get basically patches within the Patch where you could take a boat through this water. There will be moments when you see a lot of trash around you, and moments when you don’t see any trash around you … and your counter density is relatively low. Being able to locate the dense hotspots effectively–that’s where the focus is now. So we’re using long-range drones.
We’re using AI, a lot of modeling, a lot of drones to do it in a smart way. Essentially, we want to go from a sort-of brute force approach to a more surgical approach, which should reduce the costs, the number of systems we need, as well as the duration.
Will you eventually be operating autonomous cleanup ships?
Yes, some will be autonomous. We’ll have a fleet out there, and they’ll basically work like a swarm. They’ll be sharing data with each other about where the plastic is, and then you’d use drones, which have been programmed to fly through patterns to scout. It’s like a fish finder kind of principle.
What Else We’re Reading
Geothermal-champion Fervo Energy’s shares soar in trading debut (Wall Street Journal)
‘So much worse than I thought’: Utah’s ‘hyperscale’ data center could create a massive heat island near the Great Salt Lake (Salt Lake Tribune)
Trump exempted some of the nation’s biggest polluters from air quality rules. All it took was an email (ProPublica)
Soundtrack of the sea: Divers use underwater speakers to help dying coral reefs (The Guardian)