New plastic made from DNA is biodegradable and easy to recycle

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"At the time when pollution, in all its forms, represents a growing threat to the future of the planet, it is essential to improve our recycling processes and develop materials that are more easily decomposable. In this effort, researchers at Tianjin University in China have designed an easy-to-recycle, biodegradable plastic from DNA."

Dayong Yang/ Tianjin University (China)

A new plastic made from DNA is renewable,requires little energy to make and easy to recycle or break down.

Traditional plastics are bad for the environment because they are made from non-renewable petrochemicals,require intense heating and toxic chemicals to make,and take hundreds of years to break down. only  small fraction of them are recycled,with the rest ending up in landfill, being incinerated or polluting the environment.

It is made by joining short strands of DNA to a chemical derived from vegetable oil, which produces a soft, gel-like material. The gel can be molded into molds and then solidified be a freeze-drying process that sucks the water out of the gel at a low temperature.

As for alternative plastics derived from plant sources, such as cornstarch and algae, which are increasingly popular because they are renewable and biodegradable, their manufacture requires a lot of energy and they are difficult to recycle. Dayong Yang of Tianjin University in China and his colleagues wanted to design a plastic that could overcome these problems.

A plastic that can be decomposed by simple immersion in water.

The researchers created several objects using their techniques, including a cup, a triangular prism, puzzle pieces, a DNA  molecule model, and a dumbbell-shaped piece. They then recycled these objects by dipping them in a water to turn them back into a gel that could reshape them into a new shapes.

Advantages:

This new plastic is the wide availability of the starting material, since there are an estimated 50 billion tons of DNA on Earth. Yang and his colleagues used DNA from salmon sperm, but it could also be extracted from renewable sources such as crop debris, algae, or bacteria.

Since the production of DNA plastic does not require high temperatures, it produces 97% less carbon emission than polystyrene plastic and can b broken down using DNA-digesting enzymes if not necessary. "As far as we know, the DNA-base plastic that we have suggested are the most environmentally sustainable materials among all other known plastics," he adds.

Disadvantages:

It is not as strong as traditional petrochemical plastics and must be kept dry so it does not gel. So it's probably best suited for applications like packaging materials and electronics, Yang explains.

"We could also waterproof the plastic with DNA by coating it with waterproof chemicals, we do with paper cups," explains Maryam Naebe of Deakin University in Australia. Yang says his team is already planning to make commercial products out of this plastic.

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