The U.S. throws out approximately 119 billion pounds of food and 40 million tons of plastic waste every year.
"We're trying to convert the food waste to bioplastic," said Drew Wang, the principal investigator of a new project at Virginia Tech's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
"Plastic going to the landfill, food waste going to landfill, where they don't do anything good there," Wang said."Is there any way to solve the two problems in one technology?" The USDA is keen on the idea and recently granted the project $2.4 million to turn the idea into one that can be scaled up to industrial-size levels, potentially within three years.First, though, there's a dirty job that needs to get done: collecting the needed food waste.
It"smells like money" because the technology potentially can make money two ways. First, restaurants and commercial food businesses would pay them to take their food waste away and secondly, the waste creates biodegradable plastic they can sell.
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