electric cars mines mainly in the congo under terrible in humane conditions. both rush and look into the abyss. in 45 minutes on dw, the what there's to us that's why we listen to their stories. reporter every weekend dw, the open the lid poor in the hot water and enjoy all that's left afterwards. he's the packaging. what do we do with all the plastic weight? or could we manage without plastic the

welcome to tomorrow to date, display and show on dw needles has 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. for an e, you competition, a curriculum graduate students took on a challenge. could this evening be packaged in something non plastic and edible, maybe excels. 2 isn't uh, i don't know, actually part of the eggs that we can see, but that's still an important resource for us because they also contain interesting properties that could help us create better food packaging pack. all that's of the items huffman have for him. come with a hard boiled soft,

full roll fake, so delivered in that phone ideal packaging that plenty of old. every year, germans alone, each $20000000000.00 of them. so team edgy decided to focus its research on itself from the university of horn high nation to god. 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 excels. he didn't sanitize to be i genic a vegetable protein on a binding agent. the exact composition remains a secret of water mix well then poured into a tray, drawing the tiles in the oven, create that thing so that behaves like a plastic bag. i know the process to go property of the film is that it reacts to heat but can be fused together off at the contents of an audit. this means that can

be sealed into separate portions. it's a very simple product, a cup of pasta and a seasoning sachet at home voltage on the substrate to solve in a split 2nd step of it all together. and that's it. an environmentally friendly snack without plastic waste winning edgy the 1st prize in the competition? the size of the packaging succeed in retail, food markets, i would say the chances are $5050.00 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. a already hoping to get a commercial partner with a view to finding that really still a tip to sign until the following day was great to eat my 1st part noodles with all the packaging packs 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 of material that's been part of our lives since we were born cheap stereo and practical plastic has assumed various roles over the decades as toys, accessories, utility products, 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. it's like robust and can be moulded into practically any tree may want. but plastics not as easy to dispose of this instead of polymers are almost impossible to break down and degrees extremely slow. they some need 500 to a 1000 years to fully decompose plastics upgrade 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 more regular chains with comparable properties to all derived plastics. they degrade easier and even if it takes them 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 years, bio plastic is not even 10 percent. so we're just the plastics that doesn't get recycled and done. a lot of it enters our rivers and from there it's carried out to see our oceans are drowning. and plastic a team of scientists is analyzing what happens to the plastic left in 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 8. 1 of the tanks is filled with fresh water, the oven with c o 10. you can see it's encoded with quite a layer of salt sea water, a certainly having an effect because it's part of a long term study being conducted at a university in eastern gemini and smart basically in this experiment. and we're

looking to see how plastics don't compose in water so that in particular, because we want to know whether they can be recycled after by young and water for years. just like i said, the researches from not the books, university of applied sciences are especially interested in what long term goal to exposure does to normal everyday. plastic waste, how does it change its structure? how the surface is affected? the demonic is generally we concerned with what the material does to the eco system, the water. but we're looking at what the water does to our plastic. can we really get it out of the water and use it again because feed us off this as the plastic is being exposed to natural influences and as many different environments as possible . these types of been floating in the baltics that 18 months does not. what does it play as a bond with pocono of your home, but we also have 5 own documents that see because you can't recreate that

interaction with miss austin. me the, the team a scientist hoping for lots of new insights. ones that will help us to better find the growing tidal wave of plastic in our oceans. new studies and warning of an exponential rise in the amount of trash and seeds. by 2050. that could be more plastic than fish in the sea. spin pool. yeah. every year, a total of about $300000000.00 metric tons of plastic is produced to be in this see me at least $10000000.00 tons end up in our oceans. for that's the united nation is estimate, and you could say a truckload of plastic has dumped into the sea every single minute you have 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 it's not. it sinks down into the depth. see mon shits. the fits estimated that already 80 percent of plastic is already lying. i'm a c bed and can no longer being removed except thought they would get eaten by worms and all kinds of organisms organism. and when to create in short food lines back in our plates by the food chain via the fish, we don't can, i can attend up, become many green organizations trying to break this vicious circle. the ocean cleanup is probably the best known project. it uses floating structures to capture marine litter. one is one ocean is consuming a similar goal using phones to gather up the plastic, salt dates and recycle it. then that is the of

a wave project which involves trying to remove liquid from rivers before it can even get to the si se puede depending of heat and fire. on the one hand, these projects raise awareness of the issue. warning us about our use of plastic him quinn stuff and fuck kind of going to is on the other. they are a drop in the ocean shine by to the december coming in queen stores. we are currently dumping into the seas can be removed by any project or with any technology in the world and how school with it and kind of michelle spike. it 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 they. so he and his team produce rucksacks made completely of plastic from the ocean pacific that they were already a lot of great projects out there thinking the more the better. and we think that all these projects combined 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 and the pacific ocean throws up a lot of trash on the beach is here. most of the plastic is only being 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 plastic coated wrapping paper. you can recycle that anywhere in the world, including germany. they are incinerating, this is the only currently existing way of getting rid of these materials. only lorraine that if i'm close to the beach, is used to make his rock socks us. it's on clear how suitable plastic is this been out at sea for years. in the future science consent new lights on that fucking mocked of a big spam and it's currently being carried out until 5 much time as much as a so i'm i know the material is so contaminated for 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 sight in this trash of the songs. on the middle of this research on marie mitchell, they say it's important to them. one thing in mind now is the stop listening 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 this stuff done this month. and we will need to keep on researching over 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. type need a huge appetite, be able to eat fast and i just plastics like p t that's used for water bottles. amazingly, scientists have discovered an enzyme that can do just the 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 is team building is biotechnology. holds the key to our plastic problem you're showing. we look at how nature does things and then copy it and not a tree, uses enzymes to breakdown polymers. so that's what we're doing. all the team heads down to one of 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 that's not an oil beings have a wax like coating formed by an outer layer of q 2, which is a polyester. if that's a polymer that's built up by a ester bonds,

just like with p t o. by fusing buick and stuff, and this is the same for many bio plastics to eat and semi enzymes are so non specific that they can recognise and break down a 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 of the infinitive. christy and zoning 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 box. the enzyme was 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 bond, some of the links that will be broken. the man's i'm comes like a pac man, and it goes off the individual ester bonds, leading the basic building blocks parabolic acids and ethylene glycol. and from them we can make new plastics. i was coming, i mean that noise, plastic christy on inject as team have now moved on to the next step. they want to modify the enzymes, dna so that each plastic even faster to do this, they are experimenting with many different modifications. think 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 assist them. so give on, it's also no 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 couple and 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? we want to get to market to work more with poly yesterday, 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 waves, sustainable fluid is also not high different. so i think the most plastic is made from crude oil, which was produced long before we came along, or 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, formed over 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 upgrade to depths, 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 y'all gotten at clinton, they foamed became sludge, the souls for rock petroleum, or over the course of $10000.00 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. when the temperature reaches 80 degrees celsius, the petroleum sol song begins to transform long 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. extreme pressure 4th is the oil out of the rock that migrate spotwood and connex benita in tammy blazed salt mostly defined plate, creating an oil deposit. 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 substance is needed to form petroleum, but it wouldn't be ready for millions if you 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, reino, psych, a is a battery recycling pioneer. p things. battery recycling has untapped potential

and not fixed. the market is huge right now, but relatively few batteries are being returned because many countries still don't have the collection infrastructure. the contacts cause 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 seated. but lots of batteries get mixed in with the electronic waste or they were exported in such a way that we're not able to trace their route just enough. so that so the overall return rates are pretty bad, decent. 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 degrees 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. the 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. since this team 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 cost and last up to visit to large amounts of lithium ion batteries will be ready for recycling. these gold colored crumbs are 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's no description of which chemicals are inside. so each battery is

a unique surprise right next door recycler is 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 i know 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 and concentration of 234, or 5 percent finalize, you would since one test. and so these are of course, and easily accessible source, about whom austin not to why instructed 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. 2 back to the company itself . that's the use of the batteries have just come out of paralysis. well, we've removed the plastic, send it to use it was to come the image of i'm not so yeah. now 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 must 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 age often is one of the leading institutes in germany when it comes to recycling use batteries. scientists like pose up on i develop recycling concepts for all types of use batteries, including this used ion battery. the coveted raw material is in the black dust between the thin copper foils. the 1st step is grinding it all

into a fine powder. you smell, it says, you know, the black part wouldn't be active mass, also known as black mass, contains all the valuable materials that you make up a battery from lithium to nickel cobalt to ratified the all of which are extremely rare. but critical according to your opinion. standard, so thinking that's why it's very, very important that we can extract the individual elements out of the black match them into. currently 16 p h d theses are being written simultaneously on lithium recycling. libya and treat as 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. lilyanne sweet 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. so let's see, and we get, looks like this. you see a white powder, which is lithium carbonate 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 of 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. so 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 state curious by the the the,

the shadow side is going green, cobalt premises clean motility. but mining is darcy. this critical rule material is used in factories for electric cars,

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this is indeed the news line from berlin, global pressure. melton russia to allow green shipments to leave you frame you in security council members including china, calling moscow to resume its participation in international deals.