When plastic items are thrown in the trash, they can quickly pile up in landfills and create a big mess! Use your chemical engineering skills to explore problems created by traditional plastic materials and engineer bioplastics—plastics made from plant-based materials—as a potential solution to current plastic problems.

Watch this Engineering Everywhere Special Report!

Visit a chemical engineering laboratory to see how engineers are designing and testing new forms of plastic that are able to biodegrade over time.

Bioplastics Instructions

To help clarify how to create the bioplastics in Lesson 3, 'Investigate Bioplastics', we have created a set of visual instructions that includes photographs of each step in the process. Use these instructions alongside the written directions in the Educator Guide (p. 41-43) for additional support when making your bioplastic samples.