ASU develop plant-based plastics to replace harmful BPA

The world discards 590 billion pounds of plastic each year. Just 14% of it is recycled. To make matters worse, exposure to some widely used plastics can have harmful health effects.

Plastics made with the chemical called BPA, for example, can interfere with the body’s hormones and worsen risks of heart disease, cancer and infertility.

Seeking safer and more sustainable alternatives, researchers at Arizona State University are developing plant-based plastic materials suitable for use in water filtration and medical devices, such as kidney dialysis machines, in which BPA-based plastics may otherwise be used.

Matt Green, Associate Professor at the School for Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy at ASU, joined us to discuss.

“BPA is a, it’s a small molecule. That acronym stands for bisphenol A. It’s a common precursor used to make, or used to be you know a common precursor to make a whole lot of products that we would use and find on the shelves,” Green said.

Green spoke about the developments being made and how it came to be.

“So the idea was, I was visiting the University of Delaware and talking with colleagues there and they’d developed this process to convert lignin, which is a by-product of paper making and the whole wood processing, you know the industry. And they can take these lignin materials and then make a whole diversity, a whole array of chemistry and chemicals from those by-products, from those materials,” Green said.