From the top of Mount Everest to the deepest ocean trench, pieces of plastic are found almost everywhere on Earth. Specks have even been found in human blood and breast milk. This pervasiveness is just one aspect of a global crisis that encompasses the entire life cycle of plastics.
More than 95% of plastics are currently manufactured using fossil fuels1. In 2019 alone, the carbon footprint from their production reached 1.8 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, or 3.7% of global greenhouse-gas emissions — around twice as much as is generated by aviation2.
About half of the plastic produced is used only once3 and, in 2019, 353 million tonnes of plastic waste were generated (see Nature 616, 234–237; 2023). Only 9% of that waste was recycled, and 19% was incinerated2 — lowering air quality. The rest was disposed of in landfill sites (49%) or, worse, was mismanaged (22%)2: burnt in the open or discarded in the environment through littering or illegal dumping.
Preliminary studies suggest that plastic pollutants have the potential to disturb crucial Earth system processes (such as nutrient cycling in soils) and to affect local weather patterns by promoting cloud formation. They could even serve as a marker for a potential new geological era shaped by human activity — the Anthropocene epoch.
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As demand for plastics continues to soar, with annual production expected2 to nearly triple from around 460 million tonnes in 2019 to about 1,230 million tonnes in 2060, researchers in academia and industry are searching for ways to reduce their environmental cost. However, these efforts are often incremental and siloed. Progress is too slow. Academic and industrial groups need to team up to solve the problems faster.
We have been doing just that through our continuing partnership between the chemical company Eastman in Kingsport, Tennessee, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Massachusetts. This collaboration focuses on developing functional, commercially viable, biodegradable and compostable bioplastics. Here, we highlight the benefits, as well as the barriers we encountered and how we overcame them.
Close the loop
One solution to the global plastic problem is to shift from a linear economy (take–make–waste) to a circular one (see ‘Making plastics go round’), in which products are designed to be used, reused, repurposed and recycled as much as possible. Each step should generate little to no waste.
The focus of our research is on materials called polymers that are created from renewable resources, such as biomass. They are well suited to a circular economy, because they can be composted or transformed through thermal, chemical or biological processes into simpler molecules, known as monomers, that can serve as feedstock for new plastics, fuels or other products.
But shifting from linear to circular is no easy feat. Scientists and engineers must develop materials that replace current plastics effectively — serving the same purposes with minimal extra costs — but they also have to ensure that the products generated at each step can be recycled or composted. The resulting materials need to be produced on a scale similar to that of current plastics and, in practice, should mainly use the same technologies. Furthermore, components should degrade completely on timescales of months to years if they leak into the environment.
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Substantial investment in the past decade or so has yielded progress, but a lot more work is needed to truly realize a circular economy. For example, polymers have been developed that are amenable to chemical recycling technologies4,5, but it is not yet known how scalable their production is, nor how long they will persist in the environment. Some bioplastics have been made from renewable biomass sources instead of refined crude oil. These products both meet the needs of consumers and take only months to break down in the environment6. They are more sustainable than conventional plastics, and demand for them is rising. However, their costs are often higher than those of conventional materials and it is not yet clear whether they can effectively replace distinct types of plastic for different applications.
Despite the many successes, these large challenges urgently require innovative approaches.
Strive to shed stigmas
We contend that, now more than ever, strengthening collaborations between industry and academia is key to moving away from conventional plastics. Such partnerships have proved successful in sectors from the computer sciences — including the development of high-performance computing centres and the potential application of artificial intelligence in diverse fields — to health care, for the rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines, for example.
But in the environmental and sustainability sciences, these collaborations are less common. In our experience, stigma is an important reason. In academia, applied science is often perceived as less prestigious than its fundamental counterpart. And industry is often blamed for environmental problems such as plastic waste and climate change. Some people openly see such collaborations as academics ‘selling out’ and industrials ‘buying’ scientific results. Two of us (C.P.W. and C.M.R.) have found that presentations and manuscripts that we co-authored with industrial partners attracted more comments and scrutiny than did other work.
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It’s time for the sustainability field to leave these outdated views behind.
Plastics are here to stay — they can be replaced by other materials for some applications, but not all. The enormous use of personal protective equipment and disposable food and drink containers and utensils during the COVID-19 pandemic provided an illustration. What matters is which plastics are used and what their fate is at the end of their life. Materials must be identified that are sustainably sourced, meet the approval and rising demand of consumers, and have acceptable end-of-life scenarios, thereby enabling a more-circular economy.
The plastic industry has certainly had a role in the current plastic pollution crisis, but so has consumers’ unchecked demand for plastic goods. Although some uses of plastic are out of their hands (such as the packaging of products), consumers can, to some extent, control the amount of goods they purchase and how they manage their waste (for example, by not littering). And the lag in adopting legislation to help curb plastic pollution has also played a part. Plastics were first detected in the ocean more than 50 years ago7, incidentally by scientists working at WHOI, yet a global treaty to enable a circular economy and to limit the leakage of plastic waste into the environment is only now being negotiated.
The time is ripe to come together to make and implement changes on a large, meaningful scale.
The benefits
The industry perspective. It is unreasonable to think that one institution, industrial or otherwise, can hold all the expertise, competencies and equipment necessary for developing innovative solutions to the plastic crisis. So, companies are keen to collaborate with academic researchers. In 2012, Eastman — which produces materials, chemicals and fibres for applications such as eyewear, food and drink packaging and textiles — established a network of universities and institutes, including WHOI, through the Eastman Innovation Center.
Our partnership focuses on understanding how cellulose acetate bioplastics used in garments, for example, decompose in the environment should they end up there unintentionally. WHOI has unique facilities (such as experimental seawater aquariums and isotope geochemistry instruments) and expertise (in environmental chemistry, biogeochemistry and microbiology) that don’t exist at Eastman and would be too costly and time-consuming to develop.
Having early academic input on the design of materials enables the development of environmentally friendlier products.Credit: Dave Rushen/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty
These partnerships also represent a talent pipeline — a former postdoc at WHOI who took part in the collaboration is now a member of Eastman’s staff, for example. And distributing discovery, development and commercialization endeavours between different groups reduces a company’s financial risks.
The academic perspective. In our case, teaming up with industry gave the WHOI group access to more than 100 years of expertise in materials science and manufacturing, to analytical facilities that do not exist at WHOI (including for material characterization), and to input on the design of prototype materials before they reach commercial markets. This ensures that our findings are environmentally relevant — because they can be implemented during the development of products, they have a more immediate and greater impact.
For example, after realizing that increasing the surface area of a material accelerated its biodegradation in the ocean6,8 our collaboration demonstrated the benefits of foamed products (with large surface areas), including prototype straws that break down twice as fast as their solid, non-foamed counterparts do9. Straws are common marine litter, and developing cellulose acetate bioplastics that degrade in the environment is crucial because, despite legislation at the local level, the global demand for these products is projected to grow from US$19 billion in 2023 to $32 billion over the next decade.
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Other advantages have taken longer to fully appreciate. For example, gaining insights into plastic markets, consumer behaviour and policy negotiations and their ramifications has revealed to the academics among us the extreme complexity of shifting from a linear economy to a circular one. Working with a marketing team in direct contact with consumers has also influenced the questions we ask and how we answer them. Sometimes, illustrating findings with a simple picture and a measure of how much plastic mass has biodegraded (using a camera and an analytical balance) can have more impact than documenting biodegradation using a state-of-the-art, multimillion-dollar isotope-ratio mass spectrometer.
Furthermore, we have learnt a great deal about other commercial products through casual conversations over dinner with our industrial colleagues. For example, the fact that inorganic additives, such as titanium dioxide, are ubiquitously used in consumer plastics is not widely known among academics studying plastic pollution. Yet these additives can substantially alter plastics’ potential for biofouling, their degradation rates and products and the toxicity of such products to aquatic life10–12. These findings have enabled research communities to better understand the composition of the plastics they study.
The challenges
Most of the challenges we’ve faced have been structural.
Oversight. We have found that holding meetings monthly is advantageous and a good timeframe for both sides. These interactions create value for the company — maximizing learning through regular conversations and keeping the project’s trajectory relevant to corporate interests. And they are valuable for the university partner — for training students in presentation skills and offering interactions with industry professionals, thus providing students with real-world experience.
This schedule is more frequent than is typical in academia, where annual reports are usually the norm. And, at first, it felt cumbersome to the academics. But with time, meeting regularly improved communication in the team and helped both partners to learn which data sets were most valuable to various aspects of the project. Frequent discussions also keep motivation up, which accelerates the pace of discovery.
Industry–academic partnerships are well suited to solve the plastic pollution crisis.Credit: Munir Uz Zaman/AFP/Getty
Timeline of research agreements. Government-funded studies typically operate over periods of several years. By contrast, as a for-profit company, Eastman works on one- or two-year projects, with quarterly assessments and the flexibility to rapidly scale budgets up or down as needed. If the company experiences an economic downturn, external spending is a logical place to cut costs. This occurred in the first and second quarters of 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic spread rapidly around the world — all externally funded projects were asked to temporarily freeze spending.
Just as with the meetings, the short-term agreements seemed burdensome to the academics at first. But as the partnership has matured, the renewal process has typically been much easier than writing a renewal proposal to a governmental agency.
Publication of the findings. In academia, peer-reviewed papers are a key performance metric that bears substantial weight on hiring and promotion processes. Therefore, it is crucial that findings are published, especially for early-career scientists. Yet companies are keen to not publicly disclose intellectual property, particularly if the research is focused on commercial innovations or products — which is the case for our partnership.
To avoid issues arising during the project, a formal agreement was reached at the start that findings would be published in peer-reviewed journals. As is common in industry, this requires approval through an internal review process. Such reviews improve the quality of the manuscript — but can take several weeks and even months. Furthermore, journals’ peer-review processes are typically slow. To avoid unreasonable delays, we now deposit our findings on preprint servers as soon as they have been approved internally.
Take the leap
We have five recommendations to improve industry–academic partnerships.
Foster trust and free communication. Identify colleagues whom you trust and establish connections with them. There will be potential partners in both industry and academia who are not trustworthy. A way to avoid such partnerships is to invest time beforehand to ensure that each party is on board with the goals of the collaboration and the plan for achieving them. The sooner sensitive topics (such as the publication of findings, holder of intellectual property and oversight models) are discussed, the more successful the partnership will be.
Keep an open mind. As with all new partnerships, there will be growing pains. Strengthening relationships takes patience, frequent communication and a willingness to readily adapt to expectations and to learn each other’s value systems. Insights gleaned in discussions with your partner can also have unexpected benefits and lead to long-term, sustained collaborations.
Adjust the metrics for academic success. An industry–academic collaboration is generally riskier for the academic partner — particularly for early-career researchers, whose goal is to receive tenure. However, these partnerships bring insights from industry to the academic environment. This is beneficial to both students and postdoctoral researchers. It can also directly lead them to permanent positions in industry, which is an exceptional example of service. It is high time that academia assessed the value and impact of research and education by factors other than peer-reviewed publications.
Reimagine funding models. At least in the United States, there is currently a push to invest in more applied research. A prime example is the establishment of the Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships at the US National Science Foundation, with a stated goal of “harness[ing] the nation’s vast and diverse talent pool to advance critical and emerging technologies, address pressing societal and economic challenges, and accelerate the translation of research results from lab to market and society”. Addressing the plastic pollution crisis certainly falls under this directorate.
We recommend that scalability be a key criterion considered by the directorate and by other programmes with similar strategic goals (such as the Alliance to End Plastic Waste). This could include investing in partnerships between large plastic producers and academia, thereby ensuring that the technologies developed to enable a shift from a linear economy to a circular one are compatible with current manufacturing technologies.
Invest, don’t divest. Because most plastics are produced from fossil fuels, and because their pollution is a sustainability problem that contributes to climate change, some institutions have begun to ‘divest’ from plastic manufacturers. Common divestment arguments suggest that industry funds academic research to shape the findings to its benefit, or to persuade the public that, although manufacturers are investing in change, they continue to reap the profits (often referred to as greenwashing). Although this might be true for some collaborations, it points back to our first recommendation: form partnerships that you trust. These concerns are furthest from the truth for us. In our experience, the scale and interwoven nature of the plastic pollution problem has necessitated collaboration, leading to rapid, interdisciplinary discoveries that would be unachievable by working independently.
Simply put, embracing and investing in industry–academic partnerships is the most effective path to solving the plastic pollution crisis and mitigating harm to the environment and to humans.