Can Plastic Be Made Environmentally Friendly?

Conventional plastics made from fossil fuels wreak havoc but replacements have struggled

By Daniel Lippman & Climatewire

Mark Herrema's road to making renewable plastics without oil wasn't easy. The 31-year-old Princeton graduate set aside his studies in politics and medical school plans to pursue his passion to make a plastic from methane, a colorless gas and a common byproduct on farms. He and his business partner, Kenton Kimmel, slowly built their enterprise working odd jobs like hotel bellhops and valets.

A decade later, private equity firms are backing their company, Newlight Technologies, and they've built two facilities to produce plastic pellets called AirCarbon.

The world produced an estimated 288 million metric tons of plastics in 2012, up from 99 million in 1989. Millions of barrels of crude oil is used to make this plastic, much of which is used only once and then thrown away.

As the world tries to move away from fossil fuels, companies are trying to make plastics from renewable sources, using resources like corn, methane and bacteria.

While the efforts so far are mostly on a small scale, they have the potential to transform how everyday materials are made, from plastic soda bottles to the plastic used in computers and cars, even the plastics used in clothes and furniture.

What Newlight does is take methane, mix it with air, put that into a reactor and then turn it into liquid. A biocatalyst then pulls out the carbon molecules and strings them together. That's then melted down and a spaghettilike strand of plastic emerges, which is finally diced into pellets.

"It's still fun for me to just hold those pellets in my hand because you're going from something that's an invisible gas to something that you're holding in your hand," said Herrema, the head of Newlight, based in Irvine, Calif.

Mining farm wastes and landfills
The goal is to make more environmentally friendly plastics. Conventional plastics often wreak havoc on the environment. They fill up landfills, end up as litter on land or in water, are toxic to many animals and often aren't easily biodegradable. They can survive as litter for thousands of years.

Most plastics are still made from oil sources, and that looks set to continue for a long time, barring a huge breakthrough that's quickly scalable.

The plastic that Newlight created can be used for electronics, automobile parts, beverage caps, packaging and more, Herrema said. The company is due to use the pellets later this year to supply plastic to make cellphone cases for Virgin Mobile.

The environmental benefits of Newlight's approach are twofold. Because methane is 21 times more damaging to the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, it helps the environment when methane is used up in this process instead of going into the air. Another perk is avoiding using oil to make plastics.

Although Newlight currently uses methane from farms, Herrema said, "landfills are also another great source of carbon that is otherwise going to go into the air either from flaring or venting, even energy production: 100 percent of that carbon goes into the air."

Green Bay, Wis.-based KI Furniture plans to start using the pellets later this year to make plastic chairs. "We have a lot of products that are petrochemical-based. ... Of course, this product [AirCarbon] will turn those products and components into carbon-negative products," said KI CEO Dick Resch, who's also an investor in Newlight.

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