• Question: What do you enjoy about studying plastic?

    Asked by anon-336023 on 12 Oct 2022.
    • Photo: Justin Perry

      Justin Perry answered on 12 Oct 2022:

      I enjoy the fact that I can design the molecule which makes up the plastic at the molecular scale and then make it, and then test the plastic to see if it has the physical properties I wanted.

      So I have a project looking at making a project where we are looking to make a plastic out of mushroom waste (the molecule is called “chitosan” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chitosan). This plastic is currently colourless &c lear and crinkles like normal plastic wrapping used for food. The problem at the moment is that it doesn’t resist water very well so the students are trying out various ideas to make it more robust.

    • Photo: Dan Day

      Dan Day answered on 12 Oct 2022:

      Plastics have a lot of environmental issues associated with them so it is great to work on contributing to some of the solutions. It is also very topical which makes talking about it with people a lot easier than some other parts of science!

Comments