You’ve no doubt seen the photos and videos—the mountains of plastic waste and plastic in our waterways and oceans—stuff that lasts for centuries. Closer to home, we see it littered along the roadsides on our way to work or the store. Hopefully, we’re not headed towards the “Great Garbage Avalanche of 2505,” as seen in the film “Idiocracy.”
Wouldn’t it be nice if all that plastic waste could just disappear—decompose into simple carbon compounds—go back to the earth? While it won’t vanish any time soon, a new plastic technology developed by a startup company, Radical Plastics, has created a plastic resin that—depending on composition—can have a “preprogrammed” time to return to basic nonthreatening carbon compounds. For its efforts, the company was the 2018 national winner of the Cleantech Open and runner-up in New York state’s 76West clean energy business competition.