The New York Times reports 300 million tons of plastic are manufactured each year. Only 10 percent of it gets recycled. About seven million tons end up in the sea each year, 24 thousand tons of which get ingested by fish in the North Pacific.
With all this plastic piling up on Earth, one of the biggest issues we face is recycling and sustainability. We’re producing so much plastic without making it truly resourceful and the excess is choking our fish and affecting our waste levels. (Plastic takes hundreds of years to disintegrate on land and requires sunlight to do so. And even though it breaks down in the ocean, it releases noxious chemicals that harm animals.)
Harvard scientists have come up with a promising solution to help eliminate plastic waste and make good use of food waste as well: shrimp shells. Biological engineers have devised a way to manipulate chitosan in shrimp shells to create a sustainable form of plastic that’s not only durable, but also breaks down and disintegrate within 2 weeks of being properly disposed of.
Chito-what?
WebMD references chitosan as a fibrous sugar substance extracted from “the hard outer skeleton of shellfish, including crab, lobster and shrimp.” A more irrepressible form of chitin, chitosan is used to treat obesity, high cholesterol and “complications that kidney failure patients on dialysis face.”
Scientists creating bioplastics at Harvard University have devised a version of plastic derived from chitosan pulled straight from shrimp exoskeletons. Dubbed shrilk, biodegradable plastic can “break down into the environment after two weeks and release nutrients that feed plants at the same time,” according to Inhabitat.com.
Shrilk is quite different from bioplastics developed from plant cellulose, which don’t fully degrade once altered. In addition to the fact such plastic requires petroleum that they aren’t economically sustainable. Shrilk can be modified for use in water; its color can be altered by compound acidity and the dyes collected and reused in the recycling process.
Research reveals shrilk is a highly feasible option that can be used instead of conventional plastics in various instances. With shrilk, there’s no need to have piles of plastic containers, bottles and clamshell packaging piling up in our trashcans and landfills. Instead, they can be easily repurposed for dye or used as plant-nourishing fertilizer.
I think this is pretty cool. Shrimp shells have been used in our everyday life whether you realize it or not. It’s in fertilizers, dietary supplements and cosmetics. I can’t think of another great way to make use of such an abundant “waste” material such as this besides plastic, which is also awfully abundant throughout our society.
Furthermore, it’s also pretty cool that producing the material has minimal environmental impact compared to conventional, petroleum-based plastic. Best of all, LiveScience.com says shrilk’s ingredients are FDA-approved, which makes it easier to use for medical purposes.
There’s only one major drawback to shrimp plastic at the present moment. Researcher Javier Fernandez reported that although a billion tons of chitin are naturally produced per year (more than all the plastic we’ve produced since 2009), chitosan-based plastic is not naturally waterproof. It requires a coating of beeswax to create a water barrier similar to that of petroleum-based plastics. Even then, this isn’t bad. As long as we can manage to respectfully save bees from extinction and manage beehives as efficiently as possible, shrilk can still prove to be a powerful innovation of the new millennium.