What a waste

Single-use plastics dominate the present. An ASU expert says it will take significant change to create a more sustainable future.

From our homes to our bodies, plastic is everywhere and it’s here to stay — depending on environmental factors, plastic can take anywhere from 20 to 500 years to decompose. Tyler Eglen, creator and manager of ASU’s Circular Living Lab, is driving plastic solutions today in hopes of a cleaner tomorrow.

The Circular Living Lab researches and applies solutions that address challenges related to sustainability, economic growth and community development. One project from the lab is the Plastics Microfactory, which repurposes used plastic into functional items.

“Some local businesses and community groups have a large supply of plastic but don’t know what to do with it,” Eglen said. “What a lot of people don’t know is that there is real entrepreneurial potential in giving that plastic a second life.”

Eglen believes an answer to eliminating plastic waste in communities lies in repurposing the material into locally produced household goods. With horizontal expansion of plastic microfactories throughout communities, local plastic could be shredded, melted and reshaped into something new with a significantly longer lifespan. The plastics microfactory machines and workers have created tabletops, stools, skateboards and more out of single-use plastic materials.

“In a perfect world, we could partner with communities and businesses that are producing clean streams of plastic and turn them right back into a new product quickly and locally,” he said.

Eglen knows that in our imperfect world, more work must be done to actualize a wastefree future. One of the main barriers to achieving this goal is the growth of the plastic industry, which shows no signs of slowing.

“There are resources and associations that try and guide brands to design their products more sustainably,” Eglen said. “The brands just aren’t interested, and they aren’t interested because they don’t need to be.”

These brands have good reason not to be: the responsibility to manage plastic waste does not fall on the brands who produce them. Consumers currently bear the weight of properly recycling and disposing of their plastic goods.

“A lot of the time, the consumer is often misinformed about what can be recycled and what can’t,” Eglen said. “I see a big opportunity as we go forward to increase consumer education, but the most efficient driver of change has to come from policy.”

Examples of implementing policy to reduce plastic waste can be seen in states like California, but policy is driven by those in power in 2015 Gov. Doug Ducey signed Senate Bill 1241, which declared that regulation of single-use plastic bags cannot be regulated by local authorities and must be left to state officials.

It seems fitting that plastic waste, a humanitycaused problem, can only be solved through human solutions. Eglen said policy adjustments, if combined with consumer changes and human innovations, could be groundbreaking for a more sustainable future.

“Science and technology are advancing everyday and we just need a plastic alternative to gain enough momentum to really gain popularity and stick,” he said. “There is a new hope in the younger generations to use social media and the internet to change minds and show us new options: we saw that happen with electric vehicles and I think we could see that happen with plastic.”