Op-Ed: Evolving Beyond Plastics

We wanted to spotlight the advancements in industrial biotechnology that I believe can potentially close the gap between what the furniture industry needs in material solutions to overcome our reliance on plastics and to operate in a more circular economy. The sector is producing new proteins, enzymes, carbohydrates, polymers and chemicals that can begin to replace many of the petroleum-based chemicals that serve as the base for the plastics that still dominate our world. But to understand what this means for our future, let’s first look back (way back) to see how we reached this point as a society. 

Material Evolution

Archaeological research has shown that people began creating their own furniture around 30,000 years ago. Most of this early rudimentary furniture was created using natural materials such as wood, stone and bone for about 20,000 years—materials that were readily available to the early, enterprising, humans that would fine tune their skills and tools over several thousand years. This consistent practice gave rise to more creative and intricate furniture products ranging from village life utility pieces to palace adornments. Then we reach the ages where metals and metal alloys are being developed and introduced as construction materials. This was one of the first innovations to disrupt the already ancient practice of building furniture.

Fast forward a few thousand years from the Metal ages to the industrial revolution, where the discovery of oil and advanced refining techniques are about to change not just the furniture industry, but the world. This oil boom transforms everything and restructures economies. With the accelerating rate of technological innovation fueled by petroleum and its byproducts, a rift begins to appear between how we, people, have evolved along with the environment to now having a sense of separation from it. No longer are we a part of the larger governing systems of the world, because we can now create our own systems. I’ll get back to this thought in a bit. 

In the late s and early s the first synthetic plastics were invented using byproducts from the oil industry. For the first time in history, humans were free from the constraints imposed by the scarcity of natural resources. We could now create our own materials. In fact, plastics were originally viewed as a way to protect and preserve the environment from our extractive needs. With its widespread utility, plastic was a material for the future and WWII exponentially expanded the plastics industry. The rest, as is said, is history and we find ourselves where we are today.

A Change of Heart

The optimism around plastic that was widespread only 7-8 decades ago has faded amongst the realization that we now live in a world covered with plastic. From enormous ocean gyres, to landfills, to microscopic plastic pollutants in our soils and groundwater; we have managed to incorporate our synthetic materials into a world, along with all of its organisms, that has not evolved in a way to cope with them. Some of these are toxic; some mimic natural hormones that disrupt human and animal health; some will persist for millennia, not to mention the harmful effects of some production methods.

Beginning in the ‘80s, we started to realize that plastic waste was a problem. Recycling was offered as a solution by the plastics industry and it’s still part of the circularity discussion over 40 years later—even though we know that it doesn’t work as originally advertised. I’m not saying that it couldn’t with the proper infrastructure, only that it currently doesn’t. 

Within the furniture industry alone we are sending approximately 12 million tons of furniture to the landfill annually. Additionally, buy-back-take-back programs, or products made from ocean plastic, are seen as part of the solution. I agree that they are part of the solution but certainly not a solution in and of themselves. Even if we were able to recycle every bit of plastic on earth then we are only delaying the inevitable. Eventually, those petroleum-based plastics will lose the qualities that make them useful to us and they will find their way back into our environment.

Next Generation

How do we reach circularity? I believe that the first step is to not view circularity from within any given industry. Any given industry is a system that we created and operate separate from our predominant world systems or cycles. Let’s take a step back to elementary science. I’m referring to our water cycle, nutrient cycle, carbon cycle, nitrogen cycle, and so on. We need to operate within the entire system. 

And one way to get there is through bio-based materials.

The great news is that we don’t have to start making furniture from only wood, stone and bone again. Industrial biotechnology is poised to be the next revolution in material innovation, as the new proteins, enzymes, carbohydrates, polymers and chemicals it’s producing are mostly bio-based and degradable into natural components that fit within the world’s nutrient cycle. These novel materials are “grown” through fermentation processes using microbes, fungi or animal cells along with supplemented bio-based feedstocks that generally take the form of waste products from other industries such as agriculture. Some estimate that the economic opportunity for bio-based products in manufacturing industries could range anywhere from $7.5 trillion to $30 trillion, in terms of value, by the end of this decade. 

There are not only advancements in fermentation techniques and microbe discoveries, but also in synthetic biology that are spurring this expected growth. Synthetic biology involves redesigning organisms for useful purposes by engineering them to have new abilities. We are now in the age where manipulation of genetic codes (the A,T,C, or Gs in a DNA structure) is not only possible, but ongoing. Imagine a species of yeast that naturally ferments sugar into alcohol. With some slight adjustments to its genetic code, that same yeast may now be able to ferment that same sugar into a building block for a bioplastic with superior characteristics to its petroleum counterpart. 

There have been some recent announcements regarding investments into this sector. In the fall of a White House Executive Order was signed to launch a National Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Initiative. The intent is to accelerate biotechnology innovation and grow America’s bioeconomy across multiple industries. A driving factor cited in the announcement was “Global industry is on the cusp of an industrial revolution powered by biotechnology.” Over $2 billion is to be invested within the next five years to grow biomanufacturing capacity, expand market opportunities, drive R&D, accelerate workforce training, create infrastructure, and foster innovation. This is all to be distributed through multiple government agencies including, but not limited to, the U.S.’ Dept. of Defense, USDA, Dept. of Energy, Dept. of Commerce, and Dept. of Health and Human Services.  

In February the European Association for Bioindustries released a position paper entitled “EC Initiative on Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing: Principles for an Impactful Europe.” Biotechnology is listed as one of four critical technologies for the future of European industry. Not only will it help the EU economy grow and provide new jobs, it will also support sustainable development, public health, and environmental protection. More information regarding this initiative and specific investments is expected through . 

There are also billions of investment dollars coming from public and private corporations, venture capital, accelerators, angel investors, partnerships and acquisitions. Needless to say, it seems there is a global technology and market race underway within the industry. When the dust settles, the materials we use to construct our buildings, and the furniture that goes in them, may look very different. You may just need a chemical analysis to see it.

The ETA

The time frame for any type of major impact to the furniture industry is hard to estimate. I’d like to think it will happen sooner rather than later, but only time will tell. Others are certainly being impacted already: Impossible Foods (along with about 70 other startups) are currently producing meat alternatives using biotechnology. Rio Tinto (a mining company) is using bioleaching to help extract ore. Modern Meadow is using engineered yeast to produce collagen for leather alternatives. Genomatica ferments sugars in plants to make a key intermediate for making Nylon 6, and Aquafil converts their ingredient into Nylon 6 polymer chips and has plans for a 50X expansion over the next 10 years. Bolt Threads grows mycelium to produce leather alternatives and uses precision fermentation to produce spider silk proteins for silk alternatives. Their target is the fashion industry and they’re collaborating with some major players like Adidas, Kering, Lululemon and Stella McCartney. These are just a few examples of organizations that are currently employing biotechnology to replace petroleum based or otherwise harmful materials. 

Over the last several decades the possibilities for petroleum-based chemicals and compounds seemed endless. I believe the same can be said of these “new” chemicals and compounds being created through biotechnology and biomanufacturing. After all, if we are working within the world’s systems and with natural products/processes then we have the benefit of billions of years of research and development. Nature has a way of showing us what works if we’re willing to take a look. Large oil companies and all of the byproducts that come from oil production are not going to lead us to a healthier and more sustainable future. It may not be the only way, but one way to get there is by partnering with some of earth’s smallest and most basic organisms— our yeasts, algae, fungi and bacteria. These are the building blocks for bio-based and circular economies.  

It is only my opinion (or maybe my hope) that biomanufacturing will soon be an integral part of our supply chains. This will result in a major impact to our overall sustainability, giving the industry an opportunity to become regenerative and to leave our linear ways behind us. So, can biotechnology transform the furniture industry? 

I believe the possibility exists.

It was hailed as a wonderful thing: During the oil boom in the s, chemists began to render the waste coming out of refineries into plastic — plastic packaging, plastic furniture, plastic fibers woven into synthetic cloth. These were miracle materials, moldable and pliable but strong and lasting. In the decades since, annual global plastic production has skyrocketed: Humans have created 8 billion metric tons of plastic.

That boom has, to put it lightly, brought problems. More than half the plastic ever produced —some 5 billion metric tons — lies smeared across the surface of the Earth. Every day, more than 10,000 metric tons of plastic wash into the oceans. Plastic’s durability, one of the properties that makes this material so miraculous, has rendered it a potent pollutant.

To be fair to the early boosters, plastics have changed the world. So many essential technologies — from motor vehicles to cell phones to computers — use plastic. Foam insulation has helped to make homes 200 times more energy efficient. Plastic films extend the shelf life of perishable foods.

“I don’t like how people demonize plastics as if it is the most evil thing we have ever made,” says Eleftheria Roumeli, a physicist at the University of Washington and coauthor of a examination of sustainable polymers in the Annual Review of Materials Research. “It is a product of brilliant engineering.”

Rather than abandon this material, she thinks, we need to find a better, kinder version — polymers with the tensile strength and flexibility of modern plastics that are derived from sustainable biological sources and can be effectively returned to the environment.

This means rethinking plastic production from the ground up.

From monomer to polymer

The current approach to plastic production consists of two big steps: first a breaking down, then a building back up.

The breaking down — “cracking,” as it’s known, conducted under high heat and pressure — turns refined petroleum materials into simple molecules known as monomers. These become the backbone of the product that’s built back up. The chains or lattices that result are known as polymers and serve as the basic structural component of any plastic.

But the plastic is not done yet. Next comes the incorporation of additives — colorants and flame retardants and fillers. Materials scientists consider a wide variety of variables, from “hardness” to “tear strength” to “tensile modulus,” that indicate how a plastic fares under different kinds of stresses. The most important additives tune these properties, generally by tweaking the bonds between polymer chains. Chemicals known as plasticizers, for instance, embed themselves between chains, helping to increase flexibility — but, as a tradeoff, making the plastic easier to tear apart.

By mixing and matching polymers and additives, chemists create the final composite materials that are used in food wrappers and soda bottles, as microbeads in cosmetics, even as the flexible hydrogels that, in the form of contact lenses, we affix to our corneas to sharpen our sight. Through chemistry, a single polymer like polyvinyl chloride — or PVC, as it’s often known — can be rendered into rigid stormwater piping or clothing.

Plastic production accounts for as much as 8 percent of global fossil fuel consumption — a that could rise, according to one estimate, to 20 percent by . But chemists were creating “synthetic” plastics decades before the oil industry took off, from, among other materials, waste oat husks and vegetable oil. One of the tacks toward more sustainable plastics is to turn back to such biological sources.

In , for example, the Brazilian petrochemical company Braskem launched experiments to see if they could economically render sugar into ethylene, the most important monomer in commodity plastic production. By , Braskem was selling a “fully biological” polyethylene plastic, or bio-PE.

The big upside of this material is that sugarcane will sequester carbon from the atmosphere as it grows. And since, structurally speaking, bio-PE is indistinguishable from its synthetic twin, bio-PE has been easy to deploy in applications such as food packaging, cosmetics and toys.

But being chemically indistinguishable is also a problem. Since polyethylene does not appear in natural environments, few microbes have developed the ability to break its molecular bonds. Bio-PE therefore does nothing to solve the waste problem. Just because something is a “bioplastic,” in other words, does not mean it is inherently sustainable.

“None of these terms are sufficiently regulated or meaningfully defined, which causes a lot of confusion,” says Rachel Meidl, a fellow in energy and sustainability at Rice University's Baker Institute.

Meidl categorizes plastics and their potential substitutes as existing across four quadrants. One axis charts the source of the materials: Some are “biobased,” drawn from biological materials, while some are petroleum-based. The other axis maps the downstream fate: Some materials are biodegradable and some are not. But even a material that lands in the best of these quadrants — both bio-based and biodegradable — is not necessarily a panacea. Being biodegradable just means that a material can be broken apart by microbes, even if the result is small bits of microplastics. The ideal materials are not just biodegradable but also compostable — a narrower category that indicates the material can break down into organic components that are harmless to plants and animals.

Compostability, unfortunately, is not easily achieved. You’ve almost certainly encountered polylactic acid, or PLA, in the form of compostable cutlery and take-out containers. The most common biobased plastic, PLA is technically compostable, but under specific conditions obtained only in industrial facilities that do not yet exist in sufficient numbers. Since most of today’s PLA take-out containers wind up discarded alongside food scraps, composters must waste time sorting out the two.

One way to improve plastics might be to search for better bio-sourced monomers. In , a team of scientists in California reported they had isolated a type of monomer called a polyol from algae-produced oils, then reassembled it into a foam-like plastic that could be used in commercial footwear. The material effectively degraded when placed in soils.

Some scientists, though, think a better choice is to leave behind the standard energy-intensive two-step process of breaking down to monomers and then building back up. The natural world already supplies promising polymers that are all compostable, says David Kaplan, a biomedical engineer at Tufts University. And since they degrade at different timescales, if you select the right polymer or tune it properly, you can create materials to suit varied applications.

Consider cellulose, the most common biological polymer, present in the cell walls of plants. It is essentially a chain of sugar molecules, but these chains are assembled into tiny threads called nanofibrils, which are bundled into microfibers and then into the large fibers that are visible, such as the stringy strands in celery, for example. Materials scientists call this a hierarchical structure.

Synthetic polymers, in contrast, typically are pressed into a hopper and extruded into a homogenous glob. The result is “strong, hard bonds” between molecules, Kaplan says. “Biology doesn’t do much of that.” Instead, biopolymers feature much weaker bonds — typically electrostatic interactions that link the hydrogen atoms in one polymeric molecule to those in another, but at very high densities.

But by better understanding these structures, engineers will be able to improve upon the biological materials. Research has shown, for example, that the thinner a cellulose fiber, the greater the tensile strength, which means the material resists breaking under tension. The increased surface area means hydrogen atoms are better positioned to dynamically create and break bonds between adjoining chains.

Going straight to cells

Once you’ve given up monomers — scratching out an entire step in the plastic production process — why not go further? Some materials scientists are pursuing what Kaplan calls “bottom-up design”: Rather than isolating and remaking individual biopolymers, they use what nature has provided — creating bioplastic materials from whole cells or other biological materials, no breaking open and extraction required.

Roumeli, for example, has mined the promise of algal cells. They’re small, and therefore easily manipulable; they contain large amounts of proteins, which are biological polymers, alongside other useful materials. She and her students took powdered algae and passed it through a hot presser. After several trials in which they varied the pressing time, temperature and the amount of pressure applied — all of which affect the way the molecules bond — they found they could produce a material that was stronger than many commodity plastics.

The material was also recyclable: It could be ground back to powder and pressed again. (The tests showed that the material lost some strength with each generation of recycling, which is also the case for synthetic plastics.) If it were to be carelessly tossed into the dirt, the material would break apart at the same rate as a banana peel.

Kaplan has conducted similar work with silk, long presumed too fragile to be thermally processed. The thought was that the hydrogen bonds would break down under heat and the silk would simply burn. But in a paper, Kaplan and colleagues demonstrated that pellets of silk could be molded, like plastic, into a tunable material. Since then, he’s found that entire cocoons can be processed this way.

Such materials are a win-win, Roumeli says. They’re renewable and free of fossil fuels and can even soak up atmospheric carbon as they grow. They could biodegrade completely. “The only thing that is not a win is our economics — and our scalability,” she says.

Here is perhaps the biggest problem with this new approach to plastics: Its radical nature means that it’s going to be expensive, at least for now. To make a product cheap, you want to be able to produce it in already existing facilities, since that helps a startup avoid substantial capital costs. But the owners of those facilities are liable to see biological composites as too impure — as “junk,” says Gadi Rothenberg, a chemist at the University of Amsterdam’s Van ‘t Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences.

Rothenberg notes that in the feedstock used to produce polyethylene terephthalate, the plastic used in soda bottles, only one molecule out of every 100,000 is anything but the desired monomer. Biological materials are rarely so pure.

Manufacturers may also simply prefer to go with tried-and-true over the unexpected. Rothenberg developed his own, plant-based sustainable polymer, which he d was close enough to standard materials to be an easy, “drop-in” choice for furniture production. But when he first took it to companies, “in the beginning, they didn’t even want to hear about it,” he says. Even bio-PE, the sugarcane-based product that is chemically identical to its synthetic relative, costs as much as 30 percent more to manufacture, according to some s, and so companies concerned about the bottom line are going to stick with the incumbent.

Today, bio-based plastics make up less than 1 percent of the current market, according to the trade association Plastics Europe. The push for biobased polymers “is not going to go anywhere until it reaches par on economics,” Rothenberg says. Ultimately, he predicts, governments will have to recognize the true, full cost of traditional plastic — its carbon footprint and the expenses involved with cleaning up pollution — before more sustainable materials will take hold.

Scientists in the vanguard are hopeful, though. Roumeli notes that synthetic polyethylene — “the cheapest and most produced and most consumed plastic that we have today” — once was a novelty. Kaplan says he has no doubt that one day, “all these precursors and polymers will be made biologically, or with true circularity in mind.”