Plastics

If you're designing a plastic for applications such as food packaging, you want it to stay clean but you don't want it to stick around for centuries once discarded. A new lotus-leaf-inspired material may fit that bill.

By carefully tinkering with the chemical structure of a common household plastic, scientists have managed to upcycle it into a reusable adhesive with unique properties, billing it as one of the toughest materials known to science.

Researchers have produced a new form of plastic with "unprecedented" mechanical properties that are maintained throughout standard recycling processes, and managed to do so using sugar-derived materials as the starting point.

3D printers may allow small companies to produce prototypes, but the machines aren't really suited to mass production. That's where the Mayku Multiplier is intended to come in – it's billed as being the world's first desktop pressure former.

A new material from researchers in Spain and Portugal serves as another compelling example of bioactive plastic, making use of extracts from mango leaves to fend off food pathogens and ultraviolet light.

By tweaking the process by which plastic is made, scientists hope to offer functional forms of it that safely and naturally degrade in just a fraction of the time. And recent breakthroughs suggest such a future might not be all that far away.

Researchers in China have demonstrated a new form of plastic that degrades in just a week when exposed to sunlight and oxygen, which they believe could make for electronics that are easier to dispose of at the end of their lives.

Lego has been taking steps toward more sustainable practices and has just revealed the first prototype of its classic brick element crafted from recycled plastic that meets the company's quality and safety requirements.

Scientists at the University of Edinburgh have taken plastic recycling technology into new territory, demonstrating how an engineered form of E. coli bacteria can be used to turn plastic bottles in vanillin, the primary compound of vanilla flavoring.

By mimicking the self-assembling microstructures that give spider silk its incredible strength, scientists have produced a plant-based film with the strength of common single-use plastics, offering a "vegan" eco-friendly alternative.

Most plastics don’t break down easily – and when they do, they create problematic microplastic particles. A new type of compostable plastic is embedded with enzymes that, when triggered, quickly break the material down to its constituent molecules.

As useful as plastics are in our everyday life, they’re difficult to recycle, with most ending up in landfill or the environment. Now, researchers in Japan have used a novel catalyst to recycle a common plastic into useful products like fuel and wax.