By 2050 plastic manufacturing around the world is projected to total 1 billion tons, and more than half of all that plastic is expected to end up in landfills and the ocean.
It’s an industry that relies on petroleum as a key ingredient and produces products that can’t easily be recycled without generating additional waste. But Chuanbing Tang has a game-changing idea for the world’s plastic crisis.
Tang, a Carolina Distinguished Professor of chemistry in the College of Arts and Sciences, has a vision for making plastics from inexpensive organic waste, which can readily be recycled. And these new bioplastics would perform as well as or even better than traditional plastics made from petroleum, he says.
“Using waste products such as biomass residues from agriculture and forestry, carbon dioxide and vegetable oils from food waste, we can make small molecules that can be polymerized into plastics,” Tang says. “These bioplastics would be much more easily recyclable because we can degrade the polymers back into small molecules — we call it programmable degradation or true polymer circularity.”
Tang’s idea for developing sustainable plastic manufacturing and recycling processes is more than a pipe dream. The National Science Foundation’s Centers for Chemical Innovation Program has recently funded the NSF Center for Polymers for a Circular Economy, and Tang directs a team that includes scientists from the University of South Carolina, Stanford, the University of Chicago, Mississippi State and Clemson.
The researcher team brings expertise in a diverse range of areas from catalysis and CO2 conversion to degradable polymer science and computational modeling. Tang’s USC colleague Christine Lotter, a science education expert in USC’s College of Education, serves as an advisor for the center’s education and outreach activities.
“Along with generating the science that will inform the processes for making bioplastics, our goal is to educate the next generation of scientists who will help build a more sustainable future,” Tang says.
The center is one of three Phase 1 NSF centers funded through the foundation’s Chemical Innovation Program. Only one will be selected for Phase 2 funding in 2026, and Tang is hopeful that the Center for Polymers for a Circular Economy will generate enough convincing research data to get the nod.
“This is an historic opportunity for us,” he says. “This research lays the foundation for the development of sustainable plastics for the next decades of polymer science.”
Tang is one of several professors engaged in polymer research at USC, and his experimentation has led to innovative designs of macromolecular structures and compositions that significantly enhance the thermal and mechanical properties of bioplastics. That’s important for applications beyond single-use plastic products, such as some automobile parts, which must withstand extreme conditions over the long haul.
In principle, almost every type of plastic — from single use items to more durable products — could be made from renewable biomass. Once the chemical processes for making bioplastics are fully developed, Tang says, it will likely require some combination of economic incentives and new regulations to prompt the century-old global plastics industry to adopt the new technology.
“But when you do a life-cycle analysis of bioplastics,” Tang says, “it’s clear that they may have far less environmental impact than typical petroleum-based plastics.”