Mining Plastic: Changing the Narrative From Waste to Resource

Amid growing piles of plastic waste in our landfills and in our oceans, Dr. Michael McGuirk of the Colorado School of Mines and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) is working on new methods to recycle plastics and turn them into useful products, from new plastics to fuels to polymers that can capture CO2 from the atmosphere and help ease global climate change. 

His optimism about his research is tempered by the fact that he's worried by the current cutbacks in government research funds. His talk was recorded before a live audience at the Telluride Mountain Village Conference Center with veteran journalists Judy Muller and George Lewis moderating.

Transcript

Science Straight Up

Season 6, Episode 1

Dr. Michael McGuirk—Colorado School of Mines—Speaker

Judy Muller and George Lewis—Moderators

Mark Kozak—Executive Director and CEO, Telluride Science

Recorded June 3, 2025 at the Telluride Mountain Village Conference Center

(Theme)

JUDY:  From Telluride Science, It’s Science Straight up. I’m Judy Muller

GEORGE: And I’m George Lewis. This time around…

MICHAEL: We're going to try to say that when you see that piece of plastic in the landfill or on the sidewalk, is that that's not just waste, but that's a resource.

JUDY:  Dr Michael McGuirk is the Associate Professor of Chemistry at the Colorado School of Mines and a joint appointee of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory chemistry and nanoscience Center. He remembers all those public service announcements we’ve heard over the years urging us to recycle stuff.

JINGLE: “Recycle, reduce, reuse, we can close the loop, we can close the loop.”

(CROSSFADE TO SOUND OF CANS AND BOTTLES BEING DUMPED)

GEORGE: And that’s the sound of aluminum cans and plastic bottles getting dumped at our local recycling facility.  Dr McGuirk says we do a pretty good job of recycling aluminum, but plastic is a different story.

MICHAEL: We were absolutely lied to as a society, and so because of that, we have seen the vast, vast, vast majority of these plastics end up leaked into the environment or landfills.  Only about 14 percent of that is actually collected for recycling. Of that 14% that's collected, some of it is still just lost in the process. Most of it goes into something that's called cascade recycling, which is like if I took a plastic bottle, it becomes a carpet, something like that, down cycling that's not staying in the cycle. Only 2% is actually recycled in the way that you think about it in your mind's eye, all right? And even then, it's usually only done once, because the mechanical properties of the polymers get broken down in the process, so they lose their capability. So in reality, 2% of plastics are recycled, and not even that well.

JUDY: He says there’s a better way of going about recycling, and we’ll hear about that shortly. Mike McGuirk’s laboratories are in Golden, Colorado.

GEORGE: He splits his time between The School of Mines in Golden and the nearby National Renewable Energy Laboratory, largely funded by the Department of Energy.  At a time of large-scale government budget cutting, he worries about what the future might hold.

MICHAEL: As you've probably noticed, there's a lot of things going very poorly for science in our country right now, and budget cuts, we're going to have a brain drain. There's a lot of scientists in the back of the room right now. I can almost guarantee you, not all of them are going to be in America in four years, just because the way that things are going.  But what I want to say is that I really want to emphasize to you all the locals here of how important Telluride is to us as scientists, when we put on these workshops here, we can email people we don't know on the other side of the world with the subject line, Telluride, and they answer that email immediately and say, I will be there. This is a truly unique place. The Telluride Science and Innovation Center is a truly unique center and a beautiful center now to put and so I just really want to say that from our perspective, you have something truly, incredibly unique here, and I hope that you can support it the best you can, because it is very, very important.

JUDY: Every year, Telluride science brings together hundreds of scientists from a wide variety of fields in a think tank environment where they hold workshops, share ideas and form friendships with one another. Once a week, they give the community a glimpse of what they’re working on in a series of Town Talks.  

GEORGE: In HIS presentation, Mike McGuirk said he didn’t want to be overly negative, despite his concerns about government funding. His message, he says, is a positive one: improving on the way we recycle plastics.

MICHAEL: There's a lot of amazing people doing a lot of amazing work. What we're trying to do is change the narrative. We're going to try to say that when you see that piece of plastic in the landfill or on the sidewalk, is that that's not just waste, but that's a resource. And if we can figure out how to, quote, unquote, mine it, that we have something that can really change how people are thinking. I challenge you to go a day without interacting with plastics. I would argue it is impossible. So we have this ubiquitous material, and it's ubiquitous because it has done truly incredible things. It has changed our lives. And I think a really succinct encapsulation of why plastics are ubiquitous and why they have become what they are. It's really if we go back and look at the pandemic, think of all the infrastructure. Think of all the medicine. Think of all the what happened in the hospitals. Plastic touched every single part of that because of things like sterilization, things like keeping things cool and transporting them. These things are ubiquitous because they work better than anything that mankind has ever invented, all right, and so, you know, as a scientist, you get a little bit, especially a chemist, you can get a little bit protective of plastics, because these were a revolutionary scientific achievement, I would argue that they, you know, it's gone too far at this point in terms of how they've been into our lives. But this, this achievement of making polymers that then made into plastics, was a revolution.

JUDY: He showed his audience a slide depicting the rise of plastics production from the 1950’s until now. 2 million metric tons back then rising to 450 million metric tons now. That’s about half the weight of all the fish in the ocean.  But Mike McGuirk says in a few years, it’ll get a lot worse.

MICHAEL: This is the thing that terrifies me the most. This is the pessimistic part of the talk. All right, more plastic than fish by weight in the oceans by 2050 All right? 2050 is a real year. You know, it's not this distant future. So when I started my lab. I started my lab in 2019 and my twins were born, and I was 30 years old. When they're 30, it's gonna be 2050 All right, so that's, that's the number. That's, that's something that I think about a lot. This is a real, tangible thing, unless we make immense changes to how we deal with these things, all right? So we have this leakage part, but we also have this landfilling part. And so in countries like the United States, where we do have a lot of infrastructure for handling waste, we do more land filling, right? The environmental leakage, relative percentage, a lot of it will be in Southeast Asian countries, but we are very guilty as well, but we'd have this land filling here, all right. And so the leakage, the land filling, if the environmental part of this doesn't matter to you, if that doesn't strike a chord to you, maybe economics does, all right, we are throwing away and losing around $150 billion worth of products every single year.  At the end of the day, the vast majority of plastics are oil. That's all they are, all right. So let's think about the life cycle of a piece of plastic. Someone drills that crude oil out of the ground. That's a huge, intense process. But you don't just take that crude oil. You then have to refine it, taking crude oil and turning it into the molecules that are used to make polymers. That process alone consumes about half a percent of all the energy on planet Earth. This distillation, as we call it, consumes more energy than Singapore, it consumes more energy than Switzerland, all right? Then we take those molecules and we make a milk jug, all right, and you feel all good about yourself because you bought organic milk. You take that and one way or another, it's ending up in the landfill.

GEORGE: With aluminum cans, you can grind ‘em up, melt ‘em down and turn ‘em back into aluminum. With plastics, the process is far more difficult. Mike McGuirk says think of those molecules of plastic as a bunch of Legos. 

MICHAEL: So we got these molecules from oil, and then we stuck them together and we want to get them back. The problem is, is that our little brother came along and super glue them together. All right? So I have a super glued stack of Legos, and I have to decide, do I throw out my super glued stack of Legos, or do I pull them apart one by one? Think we could all agree would throw them out, right? So what we're trying to do is get this Lego chain that's been super glued together and bring it back to its pieces. Okay, so what do we have? Basically, the technology that we have is just heating the bejesus out of it all. Right, what I equate this to? I think my kids are playing with Lego back there. What I equate this to is that if you took that superglued stack of Legos and you threw it against the wall as hard as you could, it took a lot of energy to do, and you just made a mess, all right? And the problem one, you're consuming a lot of energy. Two is that when you make that mess, it's not very not very beneficial. It's not very useful. And trying to separate these things that are all pretty similar takes a lot of energy. So you're using a lot of energy you're making something that isn't really valuable, and in trying to turn that into something valuable, would also use a lot of energy, all right, so this doesn't really do anything for us.

JUDY:  He told us scientists all over the country are experimenting with materials such as sulfated zirconia to break down plastics at lower temperatures and turn them back into fuels or other kinds of plastic.  If you have any dental crowns, you’ve probably got zirconia in your mouth. SULPHATED zirconia is zirconia modified by a process that can use sulfuric acid.

MICHAEL: I have those pieces, and I can either turn them back into polymers and have what we call virgin polymers that are high performing, or these molecules are incredibly valuable across a huge swath of the chemical industry, so they can be diverted all over the place. And so this is what we are trying to do. I am a very, very small part of the puzzle here. And there's actually a few national consortiums between national labs and universities all across the United States. These are all currently funded by the Department of Energy. This is, I think, a very succinct, very clear notion as to why federal funding of research, scientific research, fundamental scientific research, is imperative. This is where the money goes. These are some of our best scientists and researchers in this country working on a problem that's extremely important.

GEORGE: But wait, there’s more.  Mike McGuirk says his laboratory is working on a project that would use filters made from recycled plastics to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and give us a shot at reducing greenhouse gases that cause global climate change.  As he talked about that, he showed off a picture depicting a bank of giant fans equipped with those filters.

MICHAEL:  Now, when the CO2..or I shoud say…the atmosphere flows through those fans and contacts this polymer, it reacts with the carbon dioxide and pulls it out and lets everything else go through. There's this, a gentleman named Klaus Lochner who's at Arizona State. People call him the godfather of what this is called direct air capture. He estimates that in order for this process to make a real difference, we need to scale this to the same size as the automotive industry. So when you are scaling something like that, you have to think about where everything comes from, right? Think about batteries right. Now, I'm sure there's a lot of people here who have electric cars, and those batteries have precious metals in them that have created a lot of kind of socio economic and geopolitical, let's say, conundrums, because we need to go get those metals. We don't want the same thing to happen here. Where this problem rises is right now, these polymers that we would use to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere come from oil. At the end of the day, a lot of these resources are still coming from crude oil. So what we're trying to do is Nix this as much as we possibly can and replace that with plastic waste. Try. So this is the goal. This is the dream, be able to go into a landfill, pull out plastics, mine that plastic we are using a process called ball milling to do this, and hopefully be able to turn that into that polymer that would be able to be used for this process. All right, so with that, I'd like to conclude. And I hope that this gives you something to kind of chew on, is that hopefully we can sort of motivate ourselves as individuals, as a society, as a government funding agency, to think differently about our waste resource. Think about it in a way where there's opportunity, right? And that's really what we're trying to do here, is create opportunity where people didn't think there was any.  And with that, I’d like to thank my wonderful group of undergraduates, PhD students and post doctoral scientists. I want to thank all these funding agencies that have been extremely good to us and these collaborators. Thank you for the opportunity to talk to you today.

  (applause)

JUDY:  I have to say that is one of the most understandable talks I've ever heard here.  

GEORGE: We’ll let you on a little secret.  Dr. McGuirk’s wife, Lindsay, also works at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and is an expert in science communication. He credits her with teaching him how to talk about chemistry in a way that people can understand.  So, I asked her…

GEORGE  What grade would you give him? 

LINDSAY MCGUIRK FROM AUDIENCE: A plus.

GEORGE: A plus. Of course, by the way, totally unbiased.

MICHAEL: Honestly, that didn't expect that. Yeah!

GEORGE But back to the subject,  I pulled out a plastic cup that I had been sipping from during Dr. McGuirk’s talk.

GEORGE: I was emptying this plastic drinking cup, and it's got a symbol on it, on the bottom with a number one. And I believe that the number one plastics are easily recyclable. 

MICHAEL: Yeah. Off the top my head, I believe that's P, E, T, P, yeah. So the didn't want to get deep into the chemistry here, most of the systems that we were talking about would be called polyolefins, and so you would have seen HDPE, PP and LDPE, those are the three main categories that fall into that. So P, E, T is actually much easier to chemically recycle because of the bonds that it's made out of. But sorry, 

GEORGE: If I dump it in that blue bin over there, what are the odds that it'll get recycled?

MICHAEL: I don't not familiar with your infrastructure here in Telluride, but I would have my doubts.

GEORGE: Me too.  I don't know that a lot of people would like to be told that they've been scammed by the recycling hype. So how do you turn How do you turn that positive, if you were designing the ad campaign for recycling and trying to tell people that there was a better way to do this..

JUDY: And we've been dutifully bagging up this stuff, yeah, for years. And to be told, I'm sorry, well…

MICHAEL:      I mean, for a long time, I think it was until about 2017 the vast majority of our plastic waste was actually getting shipped across the ocean to China or countries such as China, but they decided to no longer take our waste, and they were saying they recycling it. They probably weren't. And so it was only recently that we've had we've been forced to think about this, because I think most of us, you know, including myself, until you know, maybe 2017, 18, thought that things were getting recycled. So how do you be the optimist? That's a tough question.

JUDY: I asked Dr McGuirk about whether science and engineering are joining up to make advanced recycling a reality. He named a number of universities and other centers where this is happening.

MICHAEL: They are ecosystems for scientists and engineers to work side by side also economists. A lot of techno economic analysis goes into if, even if we So, even if you had a science that worked in order to break these down at low temperatures efficiently, let's say it uses a metal that is quite expensive, the techno economic analysis would come through and say, even though this does x really, really well because of y, this is not a path you should take, and that's only going to happen if you have these ecosystems of people communicating with one another across disciplines so interdisciplinary networks are absolutely critical to advancing these things. And not, you know, scientists, we are prone to navel gazing at times, and so that jars us out of that towards something that hopefully could be deployed one sooner than later.

GEORGE: Imagine here in Telluride, there's a lot of interdisciplinary talk amongst various scientists. I'm wondering talk a little bit more about the future where recycled plastics are going to be used to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere. You mentioned polymers. What form does that take? Are they like filters or what? 

MICHAEL: Yes, so to your point about the engineering that it's a huge, huge part of it. So if you kind of go down the rabbit hole of companies working on direct air capture or capture from point sources, there's companies like Climeworks, Svante, many others, and a huge, huge part of what they do are basically engineering the contact between the material and the atmosphere, because the time that it takes for these reactions to occur can very much so effect if they're useful or not. And so these, these materials, can basically be almost like little powders that sit on, almost like a filter that the fan would then blow air over and through.

JUDY:  The urgency to create that kind of a device that would capture carbon dioxide depends on a sense of urgency about climate change, and right now, there are people in charge of money who don't necessarily think that's a problem. So that's a problem?      

MICHAEL: That's a huge problem. Okay, yes, these are dark days. 

GEORGE: These are dark days. 

MICHAEL: To put it, yeah, I mean, to put it very bluntly, you know that we actually, my wife and I were just looking at the proposed budget for the branch the Department of Energy that funds these translational technologies, and they are proposing to cut all the money that's going to solar, wind, these types of things that we think about that are imperative for alternative energy and carbon capture definitely falls within that so a lot of scientists, and we've had these conversations, we are going to be looking aggressively more at the kind of the private sector philanthropic, philanthropic organizations and individuals are going to be are more important in American science than they have been since World War Two.

GEORGE: Can you make a case that this could be highly profitable for them at some point?

MICHAEL: Or that's a that's well, for the individual. Because there's, I mean, with these smaller companies there, you know, a lot of them end up getting scooped up by the large, classic petroleum company. So there's definitely a you get in on the ground with one of these small companies that show a technology and that company gets bought. That is 100% a thing that is happening because of the pressures on those larger companies. But, yeah, private investment in these and these small companies, and some aren't that small anymore. Some are pretty big. There's definitely potential for for reward.

JUDY: I think there's been a sort of sense of morality around the issue of plastics and plastics bad and and yet you were saying, basically, you're not anti-plastic. It revolutionized the way we preserve food and do a lot of things. But how do we get people to understand that only I mean, I go back to this idea that we've been kind of fooled into thinking, if we just recycle things, it'll be okay, but you've told us that only 2% of all that is being recycled. So again, back to the messaging. Do you think it will take? Some PR to turn people around and not be a little annoyed that they've been doing all this recycling or avoiding plastic for so long.

MICHAEL: I don't think moral arguments work. I think that, again, people don't want to be told that they've been doing something wrong, and that’s why…

JUDY: Oh, we hate that.

MICHAEL:  And I think that's why the opportunity lies in trying to change how we're thinking about it at all, that it's not let's not worry about the past. Almost is kind of the way to approach it. Let's just see what we can do with this in the future. People don't like to be burdened. People don't like to be feel like they've been put in the moral lower ground. So if you can kind of advance these things in a way that doesn't really affect people's lives, and then they don't have to think about it that much, I think that's how you can kind of push forward, because we've definitely seen in many different kind of environmentally leaning technologies, people will push back for many different reasons, and so we can't make people feel bad, because when people feel bad, they get defensive.

GEORGE: If my little plastic drinking glass winds up in a landfill somewhere, how long does it last before it starts to break down? 

MICHAEL: Um, it's going to be really dependent on the conditions, but certainly can be centuries.

GEORGE: Centuries.

JUDY: Centuries.

MICHAEL:  That's why they're so good at what they do. That's why you can put food in plastic and put it on a shelf like, you know, a vacuum sealed piece of plastic, and put it on a shelf in a supermarket for ever and not have to worry about it. That's what it was designed to do. Those it was engineered to do, and so when it goes into the environment, there's nothing there of any significant abundance that is working to break down those bonds.

JUDY: You mentioned that a lot of our plastic waste used to go to China or Asia. Are they working on any of this?

MICHAEL: I'm certain that they are, as far as we know, that the Chinese government is making enormous investments in all forms of, you know, solar, geothermal, wind, you know, you know, that's another thing. If you want to take sort of the Patriotic route to this, you can certainly argue that this is another technology that, because of a lack of a top down investment, is that we're going to fall behind, and not just the second place, the third place, the fourth place, the fifth place, and that, you know, that's a bigger conversation about investment in Science, but yeah, 100% I could almost guarantee that these investments are happening there, and and another and and other countries,as well.

GEORGE: As Americans, we've always been obsessed with being number one…

 MICHAEL: Certainly.

JUDY: The first audience question came from Mark Kozak, Telluride Science Executive director and CEO.

MARK KOZAK: I want to start with a quick question, yeah, and addressing you. You're about the durability of plastics and but you hear so much these days about nano plastics, and it makes you think, like, oh, you drink a water bottle and there's like, so much nano plastics in there, like the water is dissolving the plastic and you're drinking it. So can you speak to that about how prevalent is that or prevalent..Is that the word, okay?

MICHAEL: Yeah, it's, it's everywhere in your body all the time.

JUDY: Yes, we got one here.

WOMAN IN AUDIENCE: Is there testing available to understand how much microplastics are in the human body?

MICHAEL: I do not believe so, no, okay, not for where you're living, yeah,

WOMAN: Like, I can't go and get a test to understand how much is impacted me personally, 

MICHAEL: I don't know that. I know that. Nathan, do you know that? 

GEORGE: After consulting with a collegue in the audience, Dr. McGuirk said you can’t get a test for microplastics in your body although scientists are researching possible ways of doing that.

WOMAN: Last one, and I'm just curious how AI might be impacting the your process, whether it's testing hypothesis or models or bridging the gap between other disciplines.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So we are all in the physical sciences. We're still, I think a lot of us wrapping our head around how useful AI is. You know, it's AI is only as good as what you can train it on. As you know, what we always hear and, well, we'd like to think, in many cases, that we're at the so far. At the fore of what we're doing is that there is nothing to train it on. That being said, I think as we learn more about its utility, it inevitably is becoming a part of it, and I think we're all starting to use it in some form or fashion.

JUDY: Fun fact: Michael and Lindsay McGuirk’s 5-year-old twins, are a boy and a girl who behaved themselves beautifully while dad was on stage.  And inspired this from a man among the questioners.

MAN IN AUDIENCE: Couple comments. I’m a fraternal twin, I wish you luck. (laughter) I wish you luck with your funding. That's those are two pretty big hills to climb. I have two questions for you. One has to do with the fact that about eight to 10% of the petroleum produced in this country goes towards plastic production. So it seems to me that on the I kept trying to how you worded it, techno economy, you're fighting headwinds from both the petroleum companies and the petrochemical companies, Dow and those people who make the plastics. Could you comment a little bit on that? And my second question has to do with the what you're doing is incredibly laudable to me, because you're going because you're going to kill two birds with one stone, it seems to me. But there are other technologies that are trying to recycle plastics to make green blocks out of them. And there's a company out of I think it's Ohio, Pure Cycle Technology who's taking, I'm sure you're familiar with them. Could you comment on those types of approaches as in parallel to the work that you're doing, please. And wonderful talk.

MICHAEL: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for your question. I am a huge believer that no solution should ever or no problem should ever be approached in one single path. You know, my PhD advisor would always say shots on goal. You know, you just you try not to go too deep into the hockey metaphors. But, yeah, pucks in deep All right, but sorry, so any approach that will reduce how much plastic is going into the environment and going to the landfill. I want to be investigated to its fullest. I don't think at all about things being competitive. I think we're all working towards the same goal. And if someone's going to make money along the way, Godspeed, I think your first question was along the lines of, like pushback from some other companies. And I think what you're alluding to is that if we're able to get these resources back out, it's a little less coming from them. I would be honored for them to worry about this. I think in a lot of ways, these companies obviously are extremely and smart, extremely intelligent, and if there's opportunity there, they'll invest in it.

GEORGE: That’s about all the time we have…

MIKE: If I could just say one last thing is, I do hope that you leave here a little bit more optimistic than pessimistic is that a lot of good people trying to do good work. So… 

GEORGE: Excellen If you'd like to share what you heard tonight, Judy and I do a podcast called Science straight up, and we're starting our sixth season with this talk. Let's give a big hand to Dr Mike McGuirk for such a great talk tonight. (APPLAUSE)

MICHAEL: Thank you both you. You're wonderful.

(RECYCLE JINGLE UP AND UNDER)

JUDY: And oh, yes. In spite of all its shortcomings, Dr McGuirk says he still believes in recycling.  And George did drop that drinking cup in the blue bin. 

GEORGE: Thank you, Judy. And we want to thank the sponsors of our Telluride Science Town Talks, Alpine Bank and the Telluride Mountain Village Owners’ Association. 

JUDY: Thanks also to our audio engineer, Colin Casanova, who keeps us sounding wonderful.

GEORGE: And to the people who keep Telluride Science running, Mark Kozak is Executive Director and CEO. Cindy Fusting is Managing Director and CFO.

JUDY: Sara Friedberg is Lodging and Operations Manager and Annie Carlson is Director of Donor relations.

GEORGE: If you’d like to donate to the cause or listen to any of our podcasts, please go to Telluride Science Dot O-R-G.

JUDY: You can also hear us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. I’m Judy Muller.

GEORGE: And I’m George Lewis, inviting you to join us next time on SCIENCE STRAIGHT UP.

(THEME UP AND FADE OUT)