What is the compelling question or challenge?
Can we do better with our existing waste? How can we create new recyclable materials and create infrastructures for the repurposing of currently environmentally costly resources?
What do we know now about this Big Idea and what are the key research questions we need to address?
While there is a wealth of research and data demonstrating how creating sustainable infrastructures and recycling is beneficial to the climate, our economy, and our society, the basic research needs required to eliminate our waste problem are unmet. Often catastrophic environmental problems do not develop out of a singular event, but rather out of sustained and habitual usage of some resource (e.g. water scarcity or overfishing) or willful ignorance (e.g. recycling). However, it is not until catastrophe is imminent as a result of those poor habits that humans react. For example, the water crisis and the rationing of resources in preparation for "Day 0" in Cape Cod. It was not until under these near-death conditions that our society put restrictions its own nature by forcing ourselves to ration water and was able to prolong an almost inevitable catastrophic event indefinitely. Our practice of waste disposal and recycling inefficiencies are of the same nature. If preparative actions are not taken, we and our environment (i.e. our food and water supply), will pay a heavy, if not insurmountable, cost.
In brief, this Big Idea appears as a three-pronged approach with big questions centered around Recycling, Repurposing, & Restructuring for Sustainability: first, dealing with what we have (i.e. how do we process current waste to reverse our impact on the environment), second, developing new materials that are based on recyclable strategies, and, finally, education for future generations to appreciate the critical impact that both basic science and policy makers have on the future of our environment.
First, we must deal with what is in front of us. How can we repurpose existing waste to power our society in a sustainable way? Are strategies such as pyrolysis, the treatment of plastics with high heat and low oxygen to extract short chain hydrocarbons, the most efficient we can do? How efficient can we make them? Additionally, can we utilize nature and tune biology to do similar processes under ambient conditions?
Second, we must focus on the development of new materials. A number of research groups are focused on creating recycle-ready materials that can be easily repurposed using external stimuli such as temperature and catalysts that can carry out selective and complicated reactions under facile conditions. What types of materials are possible and how will they compare to the durable plastics we have in place? How will we scale these new materials to produce them in a cost-efficient manner?
Lastly, while the above strategies and key research objectives focus on basic scientific approaches to transform our waste into sustainable strategies, we also need to focus on extending the importance of our research to the non-scientific community. However, in order to accomplish this foundational restructuring, we need clear directives. The questions that need to be addressed span small and large scales. On a small scale, what do individuals see as the biggest challenges to implementing sustainable habits in their everyday lives and how much does general knowledge accurately reflect the conclusions of current scientific evidence about our environment? At a municipal and national level, our capitalistic democracy requires government and private industries to work cooperatively to govern the use of utilities such electricity and water. How do these groups communicate and work together and can they be better integrated? On a global level, how do governments work together to understand and address the biggest factors facing our nations' and communities' livelihoods? These research efforts require significant cross collaborations from both basic scientists and those researching social, behavioral, and economical patterns of people.
Why does it matter? What scientific discoveries, innovations, and desired societal outcomes might result from investment in this area?
As the human population continues to rise, we face the inevitable increase in waste production and energy consumption. This places high demand on our planet’s finite resources.
In the first aim, we focus on the development of new strategies to break down existing plastics and carbon-based wastes in our environment. This would come in the form of new genetically modified algae and bacteria that can harvest energy from the sun and break down plastics. Our carbon footprint is enormous and we are facing a crisis. We are constantly barraged with pictures of plastic strewn across tropical beaches, trash piles creating islands in the middle of blue seas, and these images impress the dire need to extract these plastics and hopefully reuse them in efficient way for new fuel sources. Current strategies such as incineration and exportation of plastics to foreign countries are not long term and do not solve the problem, but merely divert inevitably out of sight. Working on such biological strategies would allow us to retool these plastics to create a variety of new molecules such as biofuels, drugs, and plastics.
In the area of new materials, there would be the development of recyclable polymers and generation of "green" catalysts. While we have poured millions of dollars into generating new polymers for sustainable materials and catalysts for the construction and breakdown of these materials, scaling these basic scientific discoveries is an entirely different hurdle. From creating catalysts that work in "green" solvents (i.e. water) to reducing our reliance on precious metals, progress in these areas would provide new earth abundant catalysts that operate at low over potentials and make sturdy polymers and can be easily recycled.
The benefits of recycling and creating sustainable energy strategies are clear to most, but many fail to practice them daily and with consistency. It is often challenging for us to associate long term environmental consequences with our daily habits that may seem inconsequential. The implementation of educational outreach programs for both youth and policy makers will help to create a new societal framework centered around long-term development and preventative maintenance rather than reactive solutions
If we invest in this area, what would success look like?
Success in this area would be transformative on many scales from the way we talk about our impact on nature, to the way we develop our chemistries, to how we think about our long term economics. The approach under this Big Idea to minimize our impact on our environment would be highly interdisciplinary. While this proposal has been focused in a three-objective approach, these goals require collaborations across many disciplines from STEM to policy to education.
From an academic perspective, success is easily measured by the number of publications surrounding the concepts addressed in the preceding sections. Moreover, academic as well as industrial labs would begin to focus more heavily on these 'green' concepts. However, from a practical perspective, we would also begin to see the implementation of these new technologies such as 'green' catalysts and sustainable carbon-based materials in industrial applications by their appearance in the market place.
Finally, success would be seen as an increase in educational and policy initiatives as well as publicity of the importance of implementing sustainable strategies. From an implementation perspective, this would look appear as an increase in industry/academic cross-overs and collaborations. One major hurdle for sustainable materials getting to market is the use of tried-and-true methodologies over often costly trials based on new technologies despite their importance. Creating these collaborations to implement and scale new materials would demonstrate how this Big Idea is faced head on by public, private, and academic fronts.
Why is this the right time to invest in this area?
The 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry reflects our desire to move towards a future under this Big Idea of Recycling, Repurposing, & Restructuring for Sustainability. It was, in part, awarded to Frances Arnold, whose research perfectly embodies the first two objectives of this Big Idea by repurposing enzymes to perform new and challenging synthetic reactions. We are now facing a number of situations across the globe that have revealed the consequences of our short-sighted habits from water scarcity to extinction of species. However, new technologies have created the ability to communicate our science across borders instantaneously. This means we can make scientific discoveries at more rapid rate and create global discussions and implement effectively policies faster as well. As time passes our impact on our planet becomes increasingly evident, but so does our ability to forecast our future. For our future to be bright, we need to create a culture focused on sustainability and foresight.
References
Reference #1
Reference #2
Ocetkiewicz, I.; Tomaszewska, B.; Mróz, A. Renewable Energy in Education for Sustainable Development. The Polish Experience. Renew. Sustain. Energy Rev. 2017, 80, 92–97 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2017.05.144.
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