More than 60,000 tons of plastic makes the journey down the Amazon River to the Atlantic Ocean every year. And that doesn't include what finds its way to the river's banks, or the microplastics ingested by the region's abundant and diverse wildlife. It's easy to demonize plastic, but it has been crucial in developing the society we live in today. Creating materials that have the benefits of plastics while reducing the harms of traditional production methods is a goal of chemical engineering and materials science labs the world over, including that of Bradley Olsen, the Alexander and I. Michael Kasser (1960) Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT. Olsen, a Fulbright Amazonia scholar and the faculty lead of MIT-Brazil, works with communities to develop alternative plastics solutions that can be derived from resources within their own environments. 'The word that we use for this is co-design,' says Olsen. 'The idea is, instead of engineers just designing something independently, they...
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