Rethinking plastic
Miranda Wang is realizing a decade of research and innovation. With support from Rolex, she has successfully built a first-of-its-kind demonstration plant that can turn low-value plastics into high-quality materials, a major milestone towards a plastic circular economy.
Plastics are one of the defining materials of the modern age. Today, they can be engineered to create almost any product, from components in spacecraft to snack packaging and socks. But the qualities that have made plastics so ubiquitous: durability, strength, flexibility and affordability, have also resulted in their becoming one of humanity’s biggest headaches. Most plastic waste can so far not be re-used. Traditional plastic recycling is only able to generate lower-quality products than the original material, resulting in a constant down-cycling. At present, just nine per cent of the hundreds of millions of tonnes of plastics created each year are recycled. An estimated 52 million tonnes spill uncontrolled into the environment, harming ecosystems, endangering marine life and damaging human health.
