At the UGA New Materials Institute, we believe that a material’s useful end-of-life should be considered at the design stage and that Green Engineering principles should be part of this process.
A local fisherman in Louisiana found and returned one of the plastic pollution tracking devices Jenna Jambeck had launched in St. Louis, Missouri, over a month earlier.
Jenna Jambeck was enjoying family time on Memorial Day when she received a surprising message.
It was a call from a fisherman who had found something that he thought belonged to her: a plastic bottle. She had rigged it with a tracking device and dropped it into the Mississippi River in St. Louis to learn how trash travels in our waterways. On the bottle was a note with Jambeck’s contact info and a promise of a reward for its safe return if found.
“I get this message saying it’s in west Baton Rouge. I didn’t release any bottles in Baton Rouge,” says Jambeck, Georgia Athletic Association Distinguished Professor in Environmental Engineering and associate director of the university’s New Materials Institute. The institute focuses on sustainable product designs and rethinking how we manage our waste. “I’m thinking to myself, This must be a joke.”
So she asked him to send her a photo of the bottle. It turns out the bottle, referred to as Rogue One by the Star Wars-loving Jambeck, was one dropped upriver 881 miles away near St. Louis.
Walmart Foundation grant to UGA New Materials Institute will yield scalable strategies
Improving the circular systems related to collection, recovery and management of organic waste will help local communities lower greenhouse gas emissions and reduce the accumulation of food-contaminated packaging in their landfills. There is a growing need for new strategies to strengthen management in this waste category, as more localities ban food waste from landfills and/or extend producer responsibility for waste management to manufacturers, particularly for packaging.
Researchers at the University of Georgia’s New Materials Institute will help their hometown and five other U.S. communities improve organic-waste management practices through a 2-year project funded by a $1.2 million grant from the Walmart Foundation. The research will yield organic-waste management strategies that communities can adopt and scale, based on their population and resources. Organic waste includes food scraps and food-soiled packaging, as well as yard waste.
Diverting food waste from landfills to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions is a high priority for the U.S. government, but local communities tasked with managing this waste stream currently lack the infrastructure and strategies needed to make improvements. To elicit current practices and conditions, the team will first conduct surveys and interviews with stakeholders in waste management, restaurant and business communities, as well as residents from apartments and single-family homes. For granular solutions that can be modeled for a variety of community sizes, the team will partner with two towns in each of three population densities: 400,000 and up, about 100,000, and under 40,000.
Utilizing the Circularity Assessment Protocol (CAP), developed at the New Materials Institute, the team will gain insight into local tipping fees, the types of waste management technologies used in a community, their associated costs and their availability to consumers. The CAP will also yield data on the most commonly used products in communities, local recycling trends and other consumer behaviors related to waste management. This assessment helps identify what type of waste leaks into local environments and why, and facilitates development of strategies to minimize leakage.
“We will investigate the root causes of landfilled organics in these communities to identify the collection gaps. The data will also drive our design of organics-waste collection technologies to address the gaps we find and accelerate the diversion of this waste,” said Evan White, a co-principal investigator on the project and director of the Institute’s Bioseniatic Laboratory, which studies degradation in simulated environments.
The second part of their project will focus on deploying and testing these safe, sanitary organic-waste collection technologies—bins that vary in size, complexity and operation, based on local needs. The researchers will also conduct workshops to help educate people on composting and better waste-management practices.
In the U.S., more food waste is landfilled than any other material. It makes up more than 24% of the municipal solid waste stream and is the nation’s third-largest generator of methane gas, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. By diverting landfill-bound food waste to composting sites, individuals can curb their own carbon footprint.
Currently four states—Maine, Oregon, Massachusetts and California—have passed legislation aimed at diverting food waste from landfills in order to lower GHG emissions. Maine and Oregon passed extended producer responsibility laws for packaging in 2021, and at least six states are considering similar legislation for their 2022 sessions.
Other principal investigators on the project include Jenna Jambeck, the Georgia Athletic Association Distinguished Professor in Environmental Engineering and lead of the Circularity Informatics Lab in the New Materials Institute; Jason Locklin, director of the New Materials Institute, a Distinguished Faculty Scholar in the College of Engineering and professor of chemistry; and Branson W. Ritchie, a Distinguished Research Professor who is director of technology development and implementation for the institute and of the Infectious Diseases Laboratory.
Writer/Contact: Kat Yancey Gilmore, 706/542-6316, kygilmor@uga.edu
Do you compost food or gardening waste? Do you know what compostable certification labels look like and what they mean when you see them on packaging? Regardless of your answers, if you live in the U.S., the University of Georgia’s New Materials Institute wants to know what you know about composting, and is asking members of the public to voluntarily complete a survey by March 31st.
“While access to municipal or private composting services is increasingly common in the U.S., public knowledge of how composting works and what people are composting is not well known,” said Jenna Jambeck, who is leading the research team conducting the survey. Jambeck is the Georgia Athletic Association Distinguished Professor in Environmental Engineering, and co-founder of the UGA New Materials Institute. “Individual municipal programs may be able to track levels of participation in composting programs, but disposal of compostable packaging and compostable products has not been a focus of many past surveys of consumers.”
This survey seeks to understand consumer activities around composting, especially related to food waste and compostable food serviceware and packaging. It also seeks to gauge the level of consumer awareness of bio-based, biodegradable and compostable certification labels; disposal actions that consumers associate with those labels; and whether these certification labels influence consumer perception of consumer brands and products.
Members of the public should be able to complete the survey in less than 10 minutes, and can take it from their cell phone or other device connected to the internet. All responses will remain completely anonymous. The researchers request that only one individual from a household take the survey on behalf of the household. Data gathered may be used in research publications or presentations given by UGA researchers, students, or UGA’s research partners.
The deadline to complete the survey is March 31, 2021.
“Thank you to everyone who takes time to complete the survey. The data will help inform the design of materials before they become waste,” said Jambeck.
The UGA New Materials Institute is committed to preventing waste through the design of materials and systems that adhere to Green Engineering principles. The Institute partners with industry and businesses to design materials for their use that are bio-based, fully biodegradable, or completely recyclable, and safe for people, animals and our planet. In addition, it works with businesses and governments, foundations and other organizations to redesign systems so that they generate less waste and promote circularity in materials management. The New Materials Institute is also shaping the future by training the next generation of scientists and engineers on the importance of considering Green Engineering design principles in everything they do. For more information, visit newmaterials.uga.edu.
Products and packaging labeled as “biodegradable” or “compostable” can confuse consumers and contaminate recycling streams. (Photo by Andrew Davis Tucker/UGA)
Creating plastics, particularly packaging, is a complex endeavor. For example, multiple materials may be required to create packaging for a product, based on how far that product has to travel, how long its shelf life might be, and whether it’s packaging for a food item. So, if you are a consumer who is concerned about selecting environmentally-friendly packaging and products, what do you do? Are the claims made on product packaging clear enough to help you make the best decision when it comes time to dispose of that packaging or product? Jason Locklin, director of the UGA New Materials Institute, and Jenna Jambeck, who leads the Institute’s Center for Circular Materials Management, talked to the New York Times about the complicated choices facing today’s consumers.
The University of Georgia New Materials Institute’s Jason Locklin and Jenna Jambeck are collaborating on a virtual workshop series aimed at shaping the future of circular economy research. Locklin, a professor of chemical engineering and founding director of the New Materials Institute, and Jambeck, a professor of environmental engineering and associate director of the Institute, will join experts from academia, industry, government and nonprofits in panel discussions aimed at developing ideas and goals for circular economy research. The workshop series is funded by the National Science Foundation and is led by Melissa Bilec, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Pittsburgh’s Swanson School of Engineering; Bilec is deputy director of the Mascaro Center for Sustainable Innovation (MSCI). Other co-investigators on the grant include Eric Beckman, a professor of chemical engineering and co-director of the MCSI, and, Gregg Beckham, senior research fellow at the National Laboratory of the Rockies.
Jenna Jambeck, the Georgia Athletic Association Distinguished Professor in Environmental Engineering, leads the UGA New Materials Institute’s Center for Circular Materials Management.
Jenna Jambeck, who directs the Center for Circular Materials Management within the UGA New Materials Institute, has been named the Georgia Athletic Association Distinguished Professor in Environmental Engineering.
Jambeck is internationally recognized for her work to raise awareness about plastic pollution and to reduce mismanaged plastic waste from entering the world’s oceans.
University of Georgia College of Engineering researcher Jenna Jambeck will help lead an international, all-female expedition team that will study plastic pollution in one of the world’s most iconic waterways — the Ganges River (known locally as Ganga and Padma).
The “Sea to Source: Ganges” river expedition, in partnership with the Wildlife Institute of India (WII), the University of Dhaka and WildTeam, is part of National Geographic’s journey to better understand and document how plastic waste travels from source to sea and to fill critical knowledge gaps around plastic flow, load and composition. The expedition will offer an unprecedented and unique opportunity to scientifically document plastic waste in a watershed and develop holistic and inclusive solutions.
“I am so excited to co-lead this expedition along with an amazing international team of incredible researchers in one of the most iconic rivers on the planet,” said Jambeck, a professor of environmental engineering who leads the New Material Institute’s Center for Circular Materials Management. Jambeck is also a National Geographic Fellow. “Working hand-in-hand with local communities, from the Bay of Bengal to the Himalayas, we will explore waste, plastic, its flow through and potential impact on this important ecosystem.”
Two of Jambeck’s graduate students are also members of the research team.
An $800,000 grant from the Walmart Foundation to the University of Georgia New Materials Institute will help researchers understand how multilayer plastic packaging biodegrades and also help manufacturers in their attempts to design and select more sustainable materials. The research funded by the grant will seek to yield both upstream and downstream solutions aimed at reducing the buildup of plastic packaging in the environment.
“The grant will help us examine how the selection of materials for flexible packaging influences the biodegradability of that plastic in different environments, and also how the unique microbes that exist in these environments influence the biodegradation process,” said Jason Locklin, director of the New Materials Institute and a principal investigator on the grant. “Our data will be used to propose new and logical standards to help find ways to manage packaging waste that is presently being thrown away or blown away.”
Multilayer packaging protects nearly half of the food produced from spoiling before it can be eaten. This complex packaging is also extremely difficult material to recover and recycle, said Locklin. Currently, when two or more types of plastic are bound together to create this flexible packaging, the composite film either does not biodegrade or it biodegrades at a rate too slow to meet certification requirements that allow the manufacturer to claim its film will biodegrade; these requirements vary by country.
There are numerous microbial environments in which plastic packaging—when comprised of the right materials—could fully biodegrade, including landfills, municipal waste water treatment plants and industrial composting facilities. The research team will examine packaging biodegradability in all of these settings and propose new testing standards that governments and certification laboratories can adopt so that all flexible plastic packaging is subjected to rigorous, standard testing protocols.
The team will also conduct a nationwide assessment of existing waste management infrastructure to determine the most advantageous means of managing waste, including the proximity of composting, recycling and other waste processing facilities to the communities they serve. As part of this assessment, the team will also consider whether additional infrastructure may be needed as new types of materials produced to replace conventional plastics begin to make their way into these waste and recycling streams.
The other principal investigators on the project are Jenna Jambeck, who leads the institute’s Center for Circular Materials Management, and Evan White, an assistant research scientist. Jambeck is an associate professor in the College of Engineering. Locklin is a professor of chemistry and biochemical engineering who is jointly appointed to the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences department of chemistryand the College of Engineering.
“Tackling our plastics problem is going to require new approaches to the entire cycle of production, consumer use and disposal,” said David Lee, vice president for research at UGA. “We’re grateful to the Walmart Foundation for its support of research that aims to create benefits both for the environment and for the communities it serves.”
The UGA New Materials Institute is committed to preventing waste through the design of materials and systems that adhere to Green Engineering principles. The institute partners with industry and businesses to design materials for their use that are bio-based, fully biodegradable, or completely recyclable, and safe for people, animals and our planet. In addition, it works with businesses, governments, foundations and other organizations to redesign systems so that they generate less waste and promote circularity in materials management. The New Materials Institute is also shaping the future by training the next generation of scientists and engineers on the importance of considering Green Engineering design principles in everything they do. For more information, visit www.newmaterials.uga.edu.
A finding from University of Georgia research has been named the 2018 International Statistic of the Year by the Royal Statistical Society. CNN International interviewed the College of Engineering’s Jenna Jambeck, who worked with colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the Sea Education Association on the groundbreaking research.
More than 90 percent of plastic has never been recycled, according to the research. Prior to the research, it was unclear exactly how much plastic was ending up in landfills or, even more problematic, in oceans and forests around the world. The new statistic lends a sense of scale to the problem of global plastic pollution.
“This statistic illustrates that many of the characteristics of plastic that make it so useful — it’s light-weight, can be any color and shape with additives — also can reduce its value at its end of life and make it difficult to manage in the waste stream,” Jambeck said. “It often ends up unrecycled or mismanaged and ends up in our ocean. Besides reduction where appropriate, we need to design products and materials proactively to work within our waste and materials management systems.”
Jambeck’s previous work includes a 2015 study that was the first to estimate how much of the plastic waste produced on land made its way into the world’s waterways. Her follow-up two years later determined the amount of plastic produced worldwide since large-scale production of the synthetic materials began in the early 1950s.
Her research in 2018 also illustrated that half of the plastic meant for recycling from around the globe was being exported to China, until China ended this practice—creating even more challenges for the global recycling industry.
