In honor of July being Plastic Free month, we are featuring Tim Long, director of the Biodesign Institute Center for Sustainable Macromolecular Materials and Manufacturing, and his work focusing on how plastic impacts our world.
Plastic is literally everywhere — from the depths of the oceans to Antarctic sea ice to the microscopic pieces within our bodies. Despite it needing 1,000 years to decompose, we rely on plastic because it is cheap to produce and indispensable to our economy, from packaging and transportation to medicine and fashion. Regardless of how much we put in the blue recycling bin, plastic is expensive to collect and sort and mostly ends up in landfills, oceans and eventually groundwater and fish.
So how do we eliminate or reduce the 1 trillion pounds of plastics that are manufactured every year worldwide? That’s the mission of the Biodesign Center for Sustainable Macromolecular Materials and Manufacturing at Arizona State University, which brings together research in chemistry, chemical engineering, health sciences and mechanical engineering to address the perplexing problem.
“We’re striving to develop next-generation materials that are more sustainable, more renewable and more recyclable,” says Tim Long, director of the center within the Biodesign Institute, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary throughout 2024. Long came to ASU in 2020, building on a successful 20-year career at Virginia Tech, where he rose through the ranks, ultimately creating and directing the Macromolecules Innovation Institute.
Below, Long shares his insights on the perplexing plastic problem and how his center is tackling the issue. Answers are edited for length and clarity.
Question: Why is this work important to society?
Answer: Try to imagine a day without plastics, and you probably can’t. The issues we face today are a consequence of the fact that plastics are valued and important. As scientists and engineers, we were the ones who discovered plastic materials. Now in 2024, we need to be the scientists and engineers who make these materials more sustainable. We need to tackle it from the molecular level, from the society level and across the continuum of innovation. To become a more circular economy [a sustainable economic model that focuses on reusing and recycling materials to reduce the consumption of natural resources and avoid waste creation], we need to approach 75% recycling rates in the country. We’re currently at 9%.
Q: What is the biggest challenge in this field of research?
A: The biggest challenge is how to convince society to change our ways and consume less. In our latest National Science Foundation grant, there are two thrusts. One tackles the issue from the molecular level, the science and engineering level. The second looks at how do we engage society: How do we understand social practices? How do we understand consumers?
Q: What is something you consider one of the center’s biggest successes?
A: I believe the nation recognizes that we have a leading center just three years after its launch. How do I know that? We’re attracting great students. We’re attracting new faculty. Companies are coming here clamoring for research partnerships. We’re winning very competitive research grants. And we did all that in three years. But at the end of the day, I judge our success based on the students we attract to our research laboratories. Our biggest success is getting great students, who will take our ideas and turn them into reality, into a product.
Q: How are students involved in the center’s research?
A: My approach is to empower students to become leaders. When students go to graduate school, they’re looking to rise to the next level of professionalism. When they come to our center, we ask them to be leaders — to help us go out and purchase the latest and greatest instruments, to host seminar speakers and to give tours to major funding partners. I think one of the most important differentiating factors for our students is that they are truly integral to the center’s leadership. They know they’re building something special. They know they’re building something important. And they’re completely invested in the mission of sustainability.
Q: If someone gave your center $100 million, what would you do with it?
A: I would create a research institute, an incubator that would take laboratory discoveries and spin out small companies. Because at the end of the day, entrepreneurship is going to play a major role in sustainability. There’s a lot of great ideas that don’t make it out of the laboratory. Sometimes scientists aren’t the best entrepreneurs. And finding the mechanism to move a discovery out of the lab can be really daunting. I think we need to tackle the challenges more holistically: We need marketing. We need businesspeople. We need to attract investors.
Q: What is an example of nature-inspired research at the center?
A: When we look at nature, we understand it utilizes materials much more efficiently than we do. For example, beehives and the thick, hard-walled succulent stems inside cacti are highly organized structures with pores, giving them large surface areas with a relatively small amount of material. At the center, we’re doing a lot of research on nonsolid objects. If I can replace half of the plastic with air, then I’ve solved half of the problem.
By looking at the way nature handles porosity, it’s an inspiration for designing the next generation of foams to reduce foam waste, the sixth largest waste stream in the country. We currently don’t have a well-defined recycling strategy for it. We throw out 20 million foam mattresses in the United States every year. Our center is tackling questions such as: How do we generate a more efficient foam? How do we dispose of it? How do we recycle it?
In the laboratory, we’re developing foams that use 70% less material by simply engineering the molecular structure to be a lattice architecture. Look at the Eiffel Tower in Paris. It’s not solid. It’s a lattice structure that doesn’t use a lot of material, and yet it has stood the test of time.
Q: How did you become interested in science, and in particular, the field you are in?
A: My interest in science started in high school. I was the type of high school student who had a science lab down in the basement and fingerprinted my entire family. I also had a phenomenal high school chemistry teacher who got me excited about majoring in science in college. I grew up in Rochester, New York, headquarters for the Eastman Kodak Company, the manufacturer of film and photographic supplies. It seemed that everyone in Rochester who was successful worked for Eastman Kodak, which was another motivator to go into science.
Q: What is your favorite thing about working at Biodesign?
A: Biodesign is an absolutely gorgeous facility with very passionate people and a really big, bold vision to change the world. It’s that kind of excitement that makes it really cool to come to work in the morning.