Fighting ocean pollution with greener solutions

NTU scientists are at the forefront of combatting plastic waste with research and innovation. For instance, Assoc Prof Grezgorz Lisak and Dr Andrei Veskha from the Nanyang Environment and Water Research Institute are using their pyrolysis technology to decompose plastics into useful resources such as hydrogen and carbon nanotubes. They have now spun off the technology into a start-up named Nanomatics and are looking to scale up their pilot plant to treat one ton of waste plastics a day.

For the microplastics in the oceans, which is invisible to the naked eye, Assoc Prof Federico Lauro from NTU’s Asian School of the Environment says microplastics are already currently present in large amounts in the oceans and the damage to the environment is huge. He is now embarking on a large multinational study to look at microplastics, how are they degrading in the environment and how microbes play in that process.

To combat further plastic waste, one way is to replace fossil fuel derived plastics with biodegradable and sustainable materials. Prof William Chen from the Food Science and Technology Programme are working on various ways of turning food waste, such as discarded prawn shells and soybean residues into new types of sustainable bioplastics that can be easily degraded.