If necessity is the mother of invention, perhaps luck or experimentation is the father, as this remarkable student-made rechargeable battery discovery illustrates. Doctoral candidate Mya Le Thai at the University of California was playing around in the lab when she found a method to make batteries last for hundreds of years.

A team of researchers at UCI had been experimenting with nanowires for potential use in batteries, these were thin and fragile with a tendency to crack and break down with too many recharges. When Thai coated a set in manganese dioxide and a Plexiglas-like electrolyte gel, suddenly up to tens of thousands of cycles, in some cases even hundreds of thousands, were possible (compared to a few hundred for normal laptop batteries). Instead of batteries being the thing needing replacement, they could suddenly be the thing that outlasts the devices they power.

“She started to cycle these gel capacitors, and that’s when we got the surprise,” said Reginald Penner, chair of the university’s chemistry department. “She said, ‘this thing has been cycling 10,000 cycles and it’s still going.’ She came back a few days later and said ‘it’s been cycling for 30,000 cycles.’ That kept going on for a month. The big picture is that there may be a very simple way to stabilize nanowires of the type that we studied If this turns out to be generally true, it would be a great advance for the community.”

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Upcycling rarely looks so sleek as it does in this collaborative project between a shoe company and ocean artist collective, which uses plastic bottles and nets to make fun new footwear.

Stitched together with fishing nets, these shoes by Parley for the Oceans and Adidas are part of a 50-pair prototype run. Each shoe is made of over a dozen plastic bottles.

The trash is collected, spun into fiber and turned into high-performance shoes. The trick is to scrub that fishy smell out of the nets before using it to stitch sneakers.

Parley partners with marine nations like the Maldives, Grenada and Jamaica to clean up fisheries and oceanfronts, teaching locals to gather, recycle and reuse plastic waste.

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Plastic six-pack rings are one of the most iconic pieces of environmentally-unfriendly design and technology, adding a little convenience for humans but slowly killing animals, at least until now.

A beer brewery in Florida has created a set of 3D-printed edible and biodegradable can rings that double as food for sea turtles and other susceptible species known for getting their necks trapped inside of rings. This design also represents a neat form of recycling, being constructed from byproducts of the beer-brewing process.

The plastic ring problem has been a big one for a long time. It is estimated that millions of animals have been harmed by them, in part from getting caught within the rings, but also by eating the plastic (so the old trick of cutting the rings before discarding them doesn’t do a whole lot of good). America drinks 6.3 billion gallons of beer annually, and most of the rings end up in the ocean.

Saltwater Brewery, founded in 2013, has worked to connect with local sea lovers including surfers and fishermen. The company gives “a portion of their profits to charities working to conserve our oceans and the creatures who call it home, including CCA, Surfrider, Ocean Foundation, and MOTE. Creating the 100-percent biodegradable, edible six-pack rings was the natural next step in the brewery’s sustainability mission, and the new rings have met with resounding approval in local trials. Craft brewers in other parts of the country are already asking to use the edible rings for their own beers.”

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For the COP21 conference in Paris, Adidas decided to rethink oceanic garbage, turning it into raw material for new 3D-printed footwear, with textures and colors hinting at its unusual origins.

The shoe consists of an upper made with ocean-harvested plastic and a 3D-printed midsole made from recycled polyester and gill nets, part of a larger exploration process the company is pursuing for reused materials.

The company says there is no reason to stand on the sidelines, even if political action is taking place internationally, and that business leaders need to step up and lead environmental efforts as well, in and beyond the footwear industry. One could argue that this is still a small step, or a greenwashing effort, but it at least shows the potential for new technologies to transform old manufacturing habits.

From Adidas’ project partners, Parley: “2015 is our year, the year of the oceans: the ocean movement successfully brought the cause onto the COP21 agenda in paris. Protecting life underwater became the 14th development goal of the united nations. With a framework of political goodwill in place, it is the right moment to transform words into action.”

“Therefore, Parley in Paris is all about updating knowledge, sharing visions, fine-tuning strategies, creating concepts and forging collaborations in order to kickstart change. W are really excited to have Adidas supporting us in this journey and showing how you can take concrete steps in the right direction.”

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Eugene Chen, a chemist at the Colorado State University, has developed a fully reusable bioplastic – a unique new biopolymer that can be fully recycled back to its original monomer state for reuse through a heat-based reaction using GBL (Gamma-butyrolactone).

Previously, biopolymers could only be partially converted back to usable forms, contributing to the tens of millions of pounds of waste plastic that makes its way into the world’s oceans annually (over 5 trillion fragments).

Chen and partners were able to create linear and cyclic versions of the polymer by varying the catalysts used and the reaction conditions of the production process, upturning existing consensus opinions that purely (and complete) thermal recycling would be impossible.

These properties of the poly(GBL) underscore its immense industry-changing potential. It is importantly petroleum-free, can be broken down by living organisms (biodegradable) and can be fully recycled for future use. The discovery was published in Nature Chemistry journal and a provisional patent  recently received the Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award.

The post Biopolymer Breakthrough: World’s First 100% Reusable Plastic first appeared on Gajitz.