🌟 Patent of the Week: Revolutionary Protein-Based Plastics
Pioneering Sustainable Materials for the Future
🧐 What's the Big Idea?
Researchers Bradley Olsen and Wui Yarn Chan from MIT's Department of Chemical Engineering have been at the forefront of protein-polymer research. Their recent invention in this patent offers a novel way to create environmentally friendly plastics. By mixing special proteins, like the ones from whey or peas, with surfactants (the stuff in soap that helps oil mix with water) and polymers (long chains of molecules), this new method creates strong, bendy materials just like petroleum derived plastics. These materials can break down naturally and are easily available in our existing supplychain, making them eco-friendly and more practical to scale up.
🔍 Why It Matters
Do I need to explain the deep hole we got ourselves in with plastics? It was a fantastic innovation when first discovered in the early 20th century but at this point, its abundantly clear that we need to kick this dependance. I often describe it to friends as a local maxima that we got ourselves in and are finding it impossible to get out of. Plastic pollution is the nightmare that keeps getting worse, we’re now finding it in everything from fish to babies.
To illustrate our dependance, we used to produce 2 million tons of plastic in the 1950s and now we are at, wait for it, 450 million tons of plastic every year. If you convert that to a giant plastic sheet, you can cover the entire state of California and still have enough laying around for a few lifetimes of grocery store runs.
🚀 Stage of Development
This technology is currently in the development phase, with its foundations laid out in the patent granted to MIT. The researchers have successfully demonstrated the viability of their blends and copolymers. The implications of this work are vast, and the space is heating up with more research highlighting additional benefits to the approach such as being able to layer on antibacterial properties on these bioplastics.
🤝 Interested?
I would recommend reaching out via MIT Licensing Office to learn more about the status of the research and the next steps you can take to license it.
📒 The Details
Patent Title: Protein-surfactant-monomer/polymer blends and copolymers for protein-based plastics
Patent Application: US11066557B2
Inventors: Bradley David Olsen, Wui Yarn Chan
Application Granted: 2021
🎨 About the artist
John Berkey, An American artist, recognized for his space and science fiction-themed works, especially his illustrations of spaceships.
Very interested in this space, but it's an excellent example of the challenges that exist taking something from a lab into commercialization. Most often these plastic alternatives are not commercially viable (even at scale). I've tangentially worked with a few companies doing similar things (taking food / other byproducts / waste and transforming it into plastic alternatives). Eventually they have to work with giant companies that are the most active users of plastic (for things like packaging) and then it becomes very difficult to find the right use case that's scalable + commercially viable (w/o passing costs onto end consumers, who realistically don't want to pay more).