taking shape around the world and how we can make a difference. knowledge grows through sharing. download it now for the open the lid, pour in the hot water and enjoy all that's left afterwards, use the packaging. what do we do with all the plastic weight? or could we manage without plastic the welcome to tomorrow to date, the science show on dw eagles, i've been a favorite for decades. the japanese version is especially popular among young people. it's known as rom, and a super fast food appreciated by busy students. the growth, paste,

and hubs are packaged in plastic. a for an e, you competition. a curriculum for graduate students took on a challenge. could this evening be packaged in something non plastic and edible, maybe excels. d as and i know not actually part of the eggs that we can see, but that's still an important resource for us because to us they also contain interesting properties that could help us create better food packaging people. that's of the items often have for him come with a hard boiled soft roll fake so delivered in their own ideal packaging that kind of old every year. adjustments alone, each $20000000000.00 of them. so team edgy decided to focus its research on itself from the university of horn high and they still got it's one of the best in germany for food science with

a life that makes all kinds of experiments possible. the team spent 9 months conducting intensive research into edible packaging. in that time they perfected the formula. it's made of fine, the ground ex shells he didn't sanitize to be. i genic a vegetable protein and a binding agent. the exact composition remains a secret of water mix well then poured into a tray. drawing that house in the oven creates a thin film that behaves like a plastic bag. i know the price to go property of the film is that it reacts to heat or can be fused together of with the contents of an audit. this means that can be sealed into separate portions. it's a very simple product, a cup of pasta on a seasoning, sashay at home, low to under such a to solve in a split 2nd step it altogether. and that's it. and environmentally friendly snack without plastic waste winning edgy the 1st prize and the competition

. so sorry, you know, the packaging succeed in retail, food markets, i would say the chances are 5050 right now. the situation is quite favorable because companies are looking for new solutions. and this is an interesting solution into the front of those on the students. the already hoping to get a commercial partner with a view to funding that really stow tip to sign until the following day. it was great to eat my 1st bought needles with all the packaging texts and evidently sustainable noodles sleep, create, sustain satisfaction. the we use it for food, water bottles. detergent, plastic is everywhere. but what is plastic exactly? what is it made up? and why does it stay in the environment for so long? it's

a material that's been part of our lives since we were born cheap stereo and practical plastic has assumed various rules over the decades as toys, accessories, utility product and the dream for innovative designers. plastics consist of large molecules called polymers, which are generally manufactured from mineral oil. the oil is broken down into its constituent components, which are then recombined to create synthetic polymer change. the new material has very special qualities which like robust and can be molded into practically any stream you want. but plastics not as easy to dispose of this instead of polymers are almost impossible to break down and degrees extremely slow . the some need 500 to a 1000 years to fully decompose plastic

cell, great from an acid production. but not all of them are made for an oil. the some polymers are naturally occurring and are used to make bio plastic, cohen, sugarcane and cellulose can be chemically converted into the killer chains with comparable properties to boil derived plastics. they degrade easier and even if it takes some time to do so, there's obviously a need for non fossil basic solutions. 90 percent of plastics are manufactured from oil. the amount recycled corps qualifying is bio plastic, is not even 10 percent. so we're just the plastic that doesn't get recycled and a lot of it enters our rivers. and from there it's carried out to see our oceans

are drowning implants. a team of scientists is analyzing what happens to the plastic left and the water. these plastic tanks have been floating around in this water for almost 2 years now and they'll be there for at least another age . one of the tanks is filled with fresh water. the other with c will 10. you can see it's encoded with quite a layer of salt to see water, certainly having an effect because it's part of a long term study being conducted at the university in easton, gemini, and bodies of glee. in this experiment, we're looking to see how plastic still composed in water, that in particular because we want to know whether they can be recycled after by young and water for years. it's like a phase. the researches from that defects university of applied sciences are especially interested in what long term would you exposure does to normal every day? plastic waste. how does it change its structure? how the surface is affected?

the demonic is generally we concerned with what material does to the eco system, the water. but we're looking at what the water does to long plastic. can we really get it out of the water and use it again? because the doctor's office advocates the plastic is being exposed to natural influences in as many different environments as possible. these tanks have been floating and the voltage that 18 months does not. what does it play as a bond with pocono, of yeah, but we also have 5 ohms out them. and that's the see because you can't recreate that interaction with miss austin. me the, the team of scientists hoping for lots of new insights. ones that will help us to better find the growing title, ways of plastic in our patients. new studies and warning of an exponential rise in the amount of trash, you know,

seeds by 2050. that could be more plastic than fish in the see if in pool? yeah, every year a total of about $300000000.00 metric tons of plastic is produced. i mean this see me at least 10000000 tons end up in our ocean. so that's the united nation is estimate, and you could say a truckload of plastic is dumped into the sea every single minute to be like a kept plastic can take hundreds of years to break down. it's practically invincible. in water, it decomposes slowly into micro plastic and then often as note, it sinks down into the depths, the sea and shits. the fits estimated that already 80 percent of plastic is already lying on the sea bed and can no longer being removed except thought they would get eaten by worms and all kinds of organisms. all goodness men want to create in short

said lions back in our plates by the food chain. fish via the fish we don't can. i can attend up at home. many green organizations trying to break this vicious circle . the ocean clean up is probably the best known project. it uses floating structures to capture learning, which one is one ocean is consuming a similar goal using phones to gather up the plastic. so teach and recycle it. then that is the of a wave project which involves trying to remove alicia from rivers before it can even get to the si se puede to putting of heat and fire. on the one hand, these projects raise awareness of the issue, warning us about our use of plastic dom queen stuff and fuck, i'm going to is on the same on the other. they are a drop in the ocean and shine by to the december coming in queen stores. we are

currently dumping into the seas can, can be removed by any project or with any technology in the world and how school with that and kind of michelle steiger agrees. but he's determined to do something to of the plastic, as well as the big projects service small businesses like his attempting to recycle, marine this to he and his team, but use rucksacks made completely of plastic from the ocean. this affiliate, there are already a lot of great projects out there thinking the more the better. and we think that all these projects combine are also having an effect on the environment. it was in the philippines, some 100 people got the plastic from the waters off. one of the articles it goes on in the pacific ocean throws up a lot of trash on the beach is here. most of the plastic has only been in the water for a few weeks or months because we can recycle about 20 percent of the other. 80 percent

is made up of elastic coded wrapping paper. you can recycle back to anywhere in the world, including germany. they are in center rating. this is the only currently existing way of getting rid of these materials. only lorraine, that's if i'm close to the beach, is used to make his rock sucks us. it's unclear how suitable plastic is this been out at sea for years. in the future science consent new lights on that fucking mach to book the experiments currently being carried out until 5 much time as much as the so i'm, i know for the material is so contaminated for the cleaning and preparing it to get to a point that it could be turned into something new. it's so much effort to 1000 the chances of flight in this trash of the songs. on the middle of this research on marine michel, they say it's important to them. one thing in mind now is the staff needs to message the message can be no problem. we can recycle it. we comp that's,

that's done. it shouldn't end up the in the 1st place in black. when that stuff done mission on. and we will need to keep on researching and for the next few years to find out what we can do with the plastic. if it does end up that the ideal solution for the world's waste problems would be a plastic eating pac man. need a huge appetite, be able to eat fast and digest plastics like p t that's used for water bottles. amazingly, scientists have discovered an enzyme that can do just that. researchers in the city of leipzig have found an enzyme that breaks down plastic very fast. but to work it has to be heated between 60 and 70 degrees celsius. christiane and son and dick, his team believes biotechnology holds the key to our plastic problem. yes, all. and we look at how nature does things and then copy it. and not

a tree uses enzymes to break down polymers. so that's what we're doing it. so the team heads down to one of the live 6 main cemeteries. this is where they found their enzyme on a compost heap. let's see what we find. the researches identified an enzyme that decomposes leaves and it can also break down p t plastic. so a lot the south know irvings have a wax like coding formed by an outer layer of q 2, which is a polyester and it's uh, that's a polymer that's built up by a ester bond. just like with p t o by few and buick and stuff and this is the same for many bio plastics to you and any enzymes are so non specific that they can recognise and breakdown of broader spectrum of polyesters. and that's designed, that's the advantage we're lucky to have a biological answer into our plastic problem. opens up plastic covering for

christie and design and decor. showed us how fast the enzyme works as long as it's capped at 60 to 70 degrees celsius. the p t packaging dissolves completely in one day. all that remains is the basic building blocks. the enzyme was a lucky you find for the researchers. we have all the page oh $7.00, which stands for polyester, hydrolyzed slide $600.00 on the 7th candidate out of the 9 that we found out that was the best performing enzyme. and this is what it looks like. they produce the 3 d printed model to show how the reaction works. i mean it seems the enzyme and here's the key chain with the esther bonds. the links that will be broken, the man's i'm comes like a pac man and it goes off the individual esther bonds leading the basic building blocks parabolic assets and ethylene glycol. and from them we can make new plastics . i was coming. i mean that noise, plastic, not just youngstown inject,

as team have now moved on to the next step. they want to modify the enzymes, dna so that it eats plastic even faster. to do this, they are experimenting with many different modifications. they analyze each variant individually selecting the most efficient ones for further study. they're also turning to modern technology and artificial intelligence to help bio technologist ronnie frank is assisting them. so give on hands on it. i want to scale up our technology. so we have our new prototype here that will allow us to analyze around $100.00 enzyme samples at once. and we've been studying multiple layers at the same time. can i get the ones that will generate the data? we need to feed our a, i to then train it to identify new, improved enzymes that can break down plastic. they're analyzing thousands of enzymes each day in search of a super enzyme. and they have

a larger vision to yeah, why the manufacture ultimately to get the market to work more with polyester likes that are easy to break down with enzymes and um that will allow us to develop really efficient circular economies and getting up again. and we have no alternative because right now we can cope with the plastic waste of money. so we're looking to the future and we're having a vision of recycling. plastic waste, sustainable fluid is also not high different. so i think most plastic is made from crude oil, which was produced long before we came along. our norful keentonia from el salvador, such as the question about that. how is crude oil made crude oil wouldn't be possible without the smouldering animals and puffs clinton itself just food for sea creatures. the petroleum being extracted today foamed of a millions of years, and tiny creatures just like these. as soon as clinton

dies, it sinks to the bottom of the sea. since there is barely any oxygen at great to depth, the clinton does not decay. instead, it mixes with different settlements, like clay and found on the sea, but the settlements flowed from rivers into the ocean. together with you, what kind of clinton they foamed became sludge, the souls for real petroleum over the course of 10000 to several 1000000 years. settlement trulia is stuck on top of each other, becoming hundreds of meat as high. this process increases the pressure on the petroleum souls rock, raises the temperature. 2 when the temperature reaches 80 degrees celsius, the petroleum sol stroke begins to transform the loan chain hydrocarbons that make it up. but he can to show to chains. this process is known as cracking the fine grains digested sludge transforms into viscous crude oil. one of the most complex

organic compounds on our planet to extreme pressure force is the oil out of the rock that migrate spotwood and collect any intangible layers of salt, mostly defined clay, creating an oil deposits. today, about 15000000 liters of black gold are extracted from deposits every day. new crude oil is still forming all the time. as long as there is clinton, the substances needed to form petroleum. but it wouldn't be ready for millions of use. the petroleum has been hiring industry for the past 150 years and driving climate change to electricity is one alternative. but electric cars, for example, need rechargeable batteries, and they're still full of precious raw materials. so scientists are looking into

how to recycle them efficiently. the black box engine side chunks of old batteries. they might not look like it, but they're very valuable. inside are lots of rare metals, including the much sought after lithium. the company are correct and they failed. germany has been recycling old batteries from across europe for more than 20 years. engineer diagnose like a is a battery recycling pioneer. p things, battery recycling has untapped potential and not fixed. the market is used right now, but relatively few batteries are being returned because many countries still don't have the collection infrastructure. the contents of the awareness of how batteries are collected for recycling is not very pronounced here in germany. either. this is within the best so some other countries have higher collection rates exceeded,

but lots of batteries getting mixed in with electronic waste or they were exported in such a way that we're not able to trace their route just enough. so it does so the overall return rates are pretty bad, decent, or in fact, less than half of all batteries get recycled. that causes big problems for recyclers. there's not enough demand to build the recycling machines needed to carry out the process. in this pilot plant depleted lithium batteries are being heated to 550 degree celsius design, not ones. i said, we develop this treasure here ourselves and it's a pilot plant, a larger one that will go into operation. in a few weeks. we've plants like this one don't exist anywhere on earth to get this means the batteries have only been on the market for 5 to 10 years. for the same demand for them went up quickly and now they're being recycled to the recycling itself is still very young. and that's why pilot plans like this one are enormously

important. if you want to recycle on a large scale in growth and last up to visit so large amounts of lithium ion batteries will be ready for recycling. these gold colored crumbs, clay minerals used to safely store lithium ion batteries, which are prone to catching on fire. sorting batteries is still laborious. manual work, their components are very different, but from the outside, they're virtually indiscernible. there is no description of which chemicals are inside, so each battery is a unique surprise. right next door recyclers are working on a destroyed car battery. it might still have some residual charging it. that's why special high voltage electricians are at work here engineer diagnose so like a says it's worth the effort due to the value of the coveted contents. been

a lot of this, if we just focus on the metal lithium, it's one of the metals that's most available on the planet, but it's very finely distributed across the earth's crust. find a tie it in the costa. here we get the material for free. inside the lithium batteries, concentration of the 234 or 5 percent fired device puts in one testing. so these are of course and easily accessible source, about whom austin not to why distracted, very laboriously from nature when i can get it free of charge when recycling fly, it can be thought lithium recycling may soon become big business, but at the moment it's still in the pioneering phase, back to the increments of steps that we use of the batteries have just come out of paralysis where we've removed the plastics and it, he's, it was coming to him and of i'm not so yeah, we're left with the material mix of metals like steel, aluminum, copper,

and black mass, meaning we now have to separate those metals response muscle to be we're working closely together with our w t. h often on there to see how i'd ask them to them. are w t h. often there's one of the leading institutes in germany when it comes to recycling use batteries. scientists like powers of bond. i develop recycling concepts for all types of use batteries, including this use, the ion battery. the coveted raw material is in the black dust between the thing copper foils. the 1st step is grinding it all into a fine powder. thoughts is the black part wouldn't be active mass, also known as black mask, contains all the valuable materials that make up a battery from lithium to nickel cobalt to ratified the all of which are extremely rare, but critical according to european standards. i think that's why it's very, very important that we can extract the individual elements out of the black mass. i

meant that is currently 16, ph. d c's are being written the simultaneously on lithium recycling. lead me on to reach had specialized and what is known as hydro metallurgy. in this process, the black masses skirt into a water the lithium dissolves into the water. but the other metals do not, which makes them easy to filter out. liliana reese transforms the black broth into a clear solution around 90 percent of the lithium contains in the black mass gets recovered this way. it's laboratory work on the verge of becoming an industrial process. initially i'm in the go to here, it's i own and then we can recover it from the solution using environmentally friendly process is like membrane technology. your ion exchange is when we do that the, let's see, and we get looks like this. when you say a white powder, which is lithium carbonate, a products that can be sold in this form. it can then be used in the production of

new boundaries. by scientists and industry are predicting that that will be the case in the coming years. extracting elements like graphite, copper, iron, nickel, and cobalt, some old batteries is way past the laboratory phase. now the focus is on extracting lithium industrially. the white gold of the green energy transition. blood is red. why do you have a science question? send it to us as a video, text or voice message. if we answer it on the show will send you a little surprises the thank you to come on just as the pencil for this week's edition of tomorrow today. joining us again next week for more science stories until then

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