And so plastic comes from oil, so I phoned up BP and spent a good half an hour trying to convince the PR office at BP that it would be fantastic for them if they flew me to an oil rig and let me have a jug of oil.
We've been talking a lot about the horrific impacts of plastic on the planet and on other species, but plastic hurts people, too -- especially poor people.
Well no, not pieces of plastic, but stone seals, copper tablets, pottery and, surprisingly, one large sign board, which was found buried near the gate of a city.
They bring them below those roofs into small workshops like these, and people try very hard to separate the plastics, by color, by shape, by feel, by any technique they can.
And you can see, they're ranging from shoes, rings that were made out of stainless steal, phone covers out of plastic, all the way through to spinal implants, for example, that were created out of medical-grade titanium, and engine parts.
Anesthetize you, open your chest, put you on an artificial heart and lung machine, drop your body temperature to about 18 centigrade, stop your heart, cut the aorta out, replace it with a plastic valve and a plastic aorta.
When we produced that model, we turned it into a solid, plastic model, as you can see, using a rapid prototyping technique, another engineering technique.
様々な素材で 立体印刷ができます プラスチック チョコレート 金属 それにコンクリート
We know with them that you can print in many materials ranging from plastic to chocolate to metal and even concrete.
The middle line is millions of tons of plastic debris accumulating in our ocean, and the third line is radioactive material leaking from Fukushima nuclear power plant in the Pacific Ocean.
And in this case, I used ABS plastic to produce the columns, we used the bigger, faster machine, and they have a steel core inside, so they're structural, they can bear loads for once.
The plastic we'll build it out of is some kind of well-known plastic that we have good experience with, and we'll rebuild our modules to be able to reuse them again.
So the OMEGA system will be part of this type of an outcome, and that when we're finished using it in the marine environment, we'll be using it, hopefully, on fields.
It is oils and solvents and flavors, fabrics, all plastics, the cushions that you're sitting on right now -- they're all manufactured, and they're mostly carbon, so that makes all of it organic chemistry.
So we built a device, which we call a puff-o-mat, in which we could deliver little brief air puffs to fruit flies in these plastic tubes in our laboratory bench and blow them away.
But now we have these amazing, futuristic composites -- plastics that change shape, paints that conduct electricity, pigments that change color, fabrics that light up.
And you can literally draw joysticks and just find Pacman on your computer and then just hook it up. (Video game noises) And you know the little plastic drawers you can get at Target?
So imagine you have carbon nanotubes growing inside a 3D printer, and they are embedded inside a matrix of plastic, and follow the forces which occur in your component.
So in California, everybody's really excited about a little square of plastic that you plug into a phone and you can swipe your credit card, and people say, "We've liberated the credit card from the point of sale terminal."
In 2023, imagine you're a player walking back to the huddle, and you have your next play displayed right in front of your face on your clear plastic visor that you already wear right now.
They make these wireless sensors designed like plastic rulers that farmers can stick in different parts of the field and start collecting detailed information like soil conditions.
These scaffolds are made of a variety of different things, from plastics to naturally derived materials, nanofibers of varying thicknesses, sponges that are more or less porous, gels of different stiffnesses.
And in past decades, we've been taking those big ships out and those big nets, and we collect those plastic bits that we look at under a microscope, and we sort them, and then we put this data onto a map.
(Laughter) And we hack table lamps and webcams, into plumbing fixtures and we assemble that into a floating robot that will be slowly moving through water and through the plastic that we have there -- and this is the image that we get in the robot.
So we see the plastic pieces floating slowly through the sensor, and the computer on board will process this image, and measure the size of each particle, so we have a rough estimate of how much plastic there is in the water.
イサベル： バリでは 1日に 680立方メートルの プラスチックごみが 排出されています
IW: In Bali, we generate 680 cubic meters of plastic garbage a day.
So wouldn't it be nice if these robots, instead of being like this, made out of plastic, were made out of other materials, which when you throw them out there, they biodegrade to nothing?
And you'll see, that's stability and control -- there's no wires there or anything -- that's a combination of us refining the technology, including with a Tupperware box on the back for the electronics and actually learning the balance and control.
A venture that could help to reduce the billions of pounds of single-use plastic packaging dumped each year, and polluting our land, our rivers and our oceans, and left for future generations to resolve -- our grandchildren, my grandchildren.
It started out in the '80s, but at the beginning it was machines carving out of a foam block a model that was very, very fragile, and could not have any real use.
Shape-retaining is common in metal: you bend a piece of aluminum foil, and it holds its place. Contrast that with a plastic garbage can -- and you can push in the sides and it always bounces back.
In spite of my "girly man" hat, crocheted from plastic shopping bags, they shook my hand. (Laughter) I showed him and Maria a zooplankton trawl from the gyre north of Hawaii with more plastic than plankton.
WW: So what I did is the same process where I just kind of hold my breath and just work away very, very slowly, manipulating the plastic, cutting it, because it behaves different.
I was talking to one of them, and he was really liking this arm -- it's way, way, way better than a plastic stick with a hook on it -- but there's nobody in this room that would rather have that than the one you got.
and they have a few different types and some of them are plastic, while the Howards, they have this wooden drawer with small wooden compartments in it and a section for each type of cutlery.
Even if the Ocean Cleanup project, beach plastic recycling programs or any well-meaning ocean plastic company was a hundred percent successful, it would still be too little, too late.
Now buy shampoo or laundry detergent that has social plastic packaging, and you are indirectly contributing to the extraction of plastic from ocean-bound waterways and alleviating poverty at the same time.
Social plastic is money, a globally recognizable and tradable currency that, when used, alleviates poverty and cleans the environment at the same time.
Not like that. (Laughter) We're using mushrooms to create an entirely new class of materials, which perform a lot like plastics during their use, but are made from crop waste and are totally compostable at the end of their lives.
I wasn't just concerned about plastic that you're trying to imagine out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean -- of which I have learned there are now 11 gyres, potentially, of plastic in five major oceans in the world.
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Every cigarette butt or stray hair, shard of plastic, fingernail, toenail, piece of skin has to be tested. 