Developing CarbonSmartTM Packaging Solutions

We continue to need carbon to make the materials and chemicals needed by society. The manufacture of these goods results in an abundance of waste carbon in the form of polluting gases or solid wastes that end up in the air, our landfill, or the oceans.

The current plastic crisis has led to an increased urgency to establish effective strategies for re/upcycling plastics and other polymers. According to the EPA, the U.S. produces 35.3 million tons of plastics per year, of which only 8% is recycled while the remaining 26.8 million tons end up in landfills. With current technology only a small proportion of this material can be economically sorted and recycled into a product that is functionally equivalent, equal to or better than the input plastic. Utilizing their commercialized gas fermentation platform, LanzaTech is developing multiple novel routes to manufacture CarbonSmart^TM packaging from recycled carbon at scale.

The LanzaTech gas fermentation platform recycles carbon rich wastes, including waste emissions from industry and gasified household wastes, into the chemical building blocks needed for packaging production. By reusing waste carbon, packaging that would otherwise come from fresh fossil resources can now be produced from wastes and residues without any loss of properties. Waste carbon that would otherwise fill our air, our oceans, or end up in the landfill, can be recycled into new goods and at the end of its useful life, going through the same carbon recycling process again (and again and again). This presentation will highlight how chemical recycling to produce packaging embodies the circular economy by locking waste carbon in the material cycle.