Higher Performance, Carbon Negative Plastics, Maybe for Less: The Digest’s 2021 Multi-Slide Guide to ReSource Chemical

Here’s the “We’ve Got a Big Problem” slide that we often see at the beginning of presentations in this space, especially the good ones. Hollywood movies sometimes begin with the meet cute, but the blockbusters usually begin with the problem — arrival of the villain — ever since Darth Vader appeared 2:40 into the opening scenes of Star Wars and changed movies forever.

In this case, the villain is fossil-based plastics. Unlike Vader, there are some props given for the incredible performance that plastics have. They really do change the world, and if you notice in this age of climate sensitivity, people were reaching for plastics at every step during COVID to offer barrier protection against COVID, from wrapped masks to the plastics used in all the online deliveries that took place in the pandemic.

Here we have the tale of the tape. An unacceptable carbon footprint, a supply chain dominated by fossil raw ingredients, an explosion of usage, resulting in the predictable landfill crisis, and now we have a new and cruel twist, the rapid increase of plastics in the ocean.