Chemistry professor Matthew Baker told students that the world produced over 448 million tons of plastic in 2015 at a Science Today lecture on Tuesday.

“If that seems like a lot, it is. It’s almost incomprehensible,” Baker said during his lecture.

A major problem with plastics, Baker said, is the fate of plastic after we use it. Forty percent of plastic ends up in landfills, while 32 percent ends up in the environment. Fourteen percent is burned for energy, 12 percent is recycled once, and only 2 percent is reclaimed as part of a closed loop recycling.

Closed loop recycling is where a recycled plastic can be fully reused. The 12 percent of plastics recycled are mixed with other plastics and can lose the qualities different plastics need for different jobs. These mixed plastics become unsuitable for much beyond single-use products such as recycled plastic bags, Baker said.

After the second life of a recycled product, “the fate is the same of all other plastics,” Baker said.

Baker’s research has focused on increasing the amount of plastic that can enter that closed loop. One reason the percentage is so low is because many consumer uses for plastic contaminates the material, so it cannot be guaranteed suitable for reuse. The 2 percent of plastic currently in a closed loop recycling system comes from industry uses where they can be kept free of contaminants and fully reclaimed.

To increase the amount of plastics reclaimed, Baker focused on a plastic that can easily polymerize and depolymerize for complete reuse. Polymerization is the chemical process of using monomers to form long chains of polymers that make up plastics.

The process is “like a zipper,” Baker said. “If you zip it up, that’s polymerization.”

Depolymerization is reversing the process down to the beginning materials so they can be fully reused rather than salvaged.

“That’s relatively difficult to do,” Baker said.

A plastic with these qualities did not exist, so Baker had to design one. The overall yield from Baker’s new plastic was 70 percent after depolymerization.

“Which is pretty good for a four-step synthesis,” Baker said. “[But] 30 percent loss isn’t good in industrial scales.”

Baker is still developing his research into this new plastic, making strides like recyclable plastic with different qualities such as flexibility, yield, streamlined synthesis, water-beading and degradation in different environments including sunlight or fluoridated water.

Baker’s research will benefit from Oswego State’s new Gel Permeation Chromatography instrument, or GPC.

“I’m pumped for that,” Baker said.

The new instrument was a part of the chemistry department’s equipment request proposal this year. The GPC allows Baker to measure the length of polymer chains so he can better track the polymerization and depolymerization process. The department benefits as polymer science is a growing field in chemistry, Baker said.

“Fifty percent of all chemists will work in polymer chemistry,” Baker said in an interview after the lecture.

Access to the instrument will help chemistry students at all levels, Baker said. Undergraduates utilize the machine when creating polymers in lab while graduate students are gaining experience using an instrument they will likely use in their chemistry careers. Baker’s work is important to students at Oswego State.

“Being a biochemistry major and someone that walks outside sometimes, I hate seeing plastic everywhere,” said Kyler Anderson, a senior at Oswego State that attended the lecture. “I think chemistry is not just a tool for producing things, we use it for helping the world.”

Mary Catherine Rice, a graduate student in the masters of chemistry program at Oswego State, said plastics are a detriment to the environment and that she believes more research on the topic needs to be done, to better to understand it.

“I was interested in the degradation,” said Tim Jones, another graduate student in masters of chemistry that attended the event. “They can use light, water, fluoride, bacteria even if they tack on that sugar. That’s awesome.”

The Science Today lecture series offers students the opportunity to hear about an Oswego State professor’s research and share in their excitement.

“It’s cool to see what [Baker] does and did in grad school,” Rice said. “A lot of the time, the focus is on the students and the research that the students are doing. It’s nice to see where the professors come from, seeing them excited about the stuff that they did that got them to where they are now.”

Graduate students were excited about the new GPC instrument as well.

“Basically, it filters by mass. Depending on the size of your polymer, it filters by that,” Jones said. “It’s mainly used for polymers, but we use gel permeation in looking at DNA or proteins [or any macromolecule].”

Photo provided by:

Colin Hawkins | The Oswegonian