Whether we like it or not, we're gonna have a lot of plastic for the foreseeable.

Whilst it definitely has its negative side effects, it's also important to recognize that it's a pretty amazing material that has enabled so much.

A major issue is that all of the plastic that's ever been created still exists in some form somewhere.

One of the companies that's revolutionizing plastic has been creating products that will biodegrade in certain conditions like in heat, air, moisture, or sunlight.

The aim is to return the material back into nature⏤well, as much as they possibly can, anyway.

Poly material as plastic alternative has been around for a few years now.

It's used for food packaging and some cups.

But now, the company is moving into a slightly different type of material.

In fact, replacing what's used in some products that you might not even know was plastic in the first place.

Think face masks, women's hygiene products, or wipes.

What we're doing for wipes, diapers, tea bags,

they all have their unique use case, if you want, and also time frame within which we would want biodegradation to happen.

How does the transformation process actually work?

There's three core things: The time control piece, that's the self destructing part.

So that's... that's something that at point of manufacture, so we can dial that up or dial that down.

That's, literally, within a couple of weeks, is taking it from its plastic like state into its wax-like state.

But that's not where it stops.

The third thing that we're doing is, we make that wax draw in microbes and fungi and bacteria,

and that is the way we're able to get those materials fully back to nature in less than a year.

Well, they seem just the same as the plastic version.

They feel the same, they look the same, but once they start to transform, that's when things are very different.

And this is what it looks like.

It's very, very soft and, apparently, is completely harmless.

(It) Looks like powder, but sort of disappears.

I wanted to show you how, uh, biotransformed, uh, wax looked like and felt like versus, uh, microplastic.

- And that's what you've touched a bit before. - Yes.

And we've put that in... in this vial um to show you how it behaves when you heat it slightly.

- Now, it's completely melting, and you can see that the other bit of plastic is completely the same. - Yeah.

- As I would expect to stay just the same. - You see?

It just looks the same.

And, now, if I take this one and I tilt it, it flows like a candle.

What you will have in nature is that you will have a bottle biotransforming and becoming, uh, wax,

and that wax will then be fully biodegraded like a banana peel or apple core by nature.

We've looked at other companies before who are trying to solve the plastic problem.

What is it about your products that means they can actually do the job?

We've published more papers in this space than anyone else,

so, we put our data out there to be rigorously reviewed by other experts in this field.

What we're really trying to do is create something that's capable of moving the needle on a hundred-million-ton-per-annum problem.

They are continuing to develop the technology, and whilst there's no silver bullet, there are alternatives being worked on.

Founded by 22-year-old Jacob Nathan, Epoch BioDesign is looking to change the way plastic is broken down.

We design enzymes that break down plastic waste, and the resulting chemicals that we make from that,

we can manufacture into all sorts of new products like paints, coatings, fertilizers, cleaning products, and, ultimately, new plastic.

The beauty of biology is that it enables us to carry out chemical reactions at very, very low temperatures.

And, so, we can use enzymes that enable these sorts of chemical reactions to happen at very low temperatures and pressures

to break down those plastics into those building blocks to make those new plastics again.

There are two sides to this equation.

One is we make way too much of the stuff.

But the other is we don't actually know what to do with most of it once we're done using it, right?

Even if we stopped making plastics tomorrow, we still have 10 billion tons that are just, sort of, sitting around taking up space.

And we might want to do something with that.