Group Lead, Ved Krishna
Hello, hello! Are you ready to geek out over biochemistry and compostable polymers with us? Well, you better be! Cause we have Dr. Evan White joining us to talk about the incredible work he’s doing as the Director of The BiosenaticSM Lab. This analytical lab is part of the University of Georgia’s
0:00 – life the the receiving environment um hopefully compost industrial compost managed environments...
hello hello I’m so happy today to have Evan White the director at biotic uh labs and uh Evan I’m so happy to have you here and I’m looking forward to learning from you but I’m going to start at the very beginning what does biotic mean and why that name yeah thank you so much V for the opportunity to speak with you and uh talk a little bit about uh
10:00 – I'm not a recycling expert I'm but in terms of compostable packaging...
uh that you know might taste bad might be you know have toxic effects at certain concentrations so uh there’s a limit to how many times you can process those over and over and over again um and uh the the case is true for polyethylene for poly olins it’s true for polystyrene and for polyesters as well um and that’s in part because of the contaminat
21:00 – Transportation uh of fuel refining so like one's a waste product ethylene...
bit on life cycle analysis for like the making of materials and the the embedded energy and materials to produce things um uh I I I know of this as an issue and um I know of some examples uh I don’t study this personally but uh I’ll give an example of um P pla versus polyethylene you know that’s a common example how much energy is required to make
32:00 – to study uh composable materials new materials and to understand and design...
what is the effort uh in terms of what are you trying to achieve uh by the work that you’re doing right right thank thanks V uh yeah so the biotic lab is basically our analytical Workhorse lab for studying compostable materials uh we run a lot of feif for service work and sponsor projects out of this lab But ultimately it’s a research and developme
43:00 – packaging design when if it's all compostable can't do that with recycling...
you’re causing a bigger ecological disaster because of the whole chain of how the potato was grown right through to you know getting packaged so so how do you see that evolving so that again we can have materials that will degrade recycle and do the job of protecting what is inside yeah that’s that’s a loaded question and uh I I don’t know if I kno
53:00 – a material to be considered a biodegradable plastic or a compostable plastic...
scenario for the packaging format as to whether or not something like like a like a like a multi-layer construct with paper or or um or cellulosic products makes sense um I can think of you know plenty in the produce section plenty of options where that would make sense for paper products U but if you go towards the the center of the grocery stores
64:00 – Plastics uh I should say all Plastics but really most materials I...
talk to a lot of scientists they’re not even sure about pla that you know what is the damage that it does inside and is that what you mean when you talk about uh the test the test that you were talking about just just before the last question uh in the context of persistence uh yeah a little bit in terms of ingesting um so so really all Plastics uh
75:00 – is um that in the context of our industry compostables compostable packaging...
polyure things are using all kinds of codings and they’re very durable and provide a lot of good barrier properties uh so there I think there’s a lot of opportunities because of the flexibility of that of that platform so uh lot of opportunities I believe with polyurethanes too from a from a synthetic standpoint superb um since you’re in this envir
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