28 May Telluride Science Town Talks: “Plastic: Changing Narrative from Waste to Resource,” 6/3!
This coming week the 2025 Telluride Science Town Talks series begins with “Mining Plastic: Changing the Narrative from Waste to Resource.” The event takes place Tuesday, June 3, 6:30 pm, doors, 6 p.m., at the Telluride Conference Center in Mountain Village. Town Talks are FREE and open to the public.
Visit telluridescience.org to learn more about Telluride Science and the capital campaign to transform the historic Telluride Depot into the Telluride Science & Innovation Center. The venue is the permanent home for Telluride Science and a global hub of inspired knowledge exchange and development where great minds get to solve great challenges.
The 2025 Telluride Science Town Talks series is presented by Alpine Bank with additional support from the Telluride Mountain Village Owner’s Association.
Go here for more about Telluride Science.
Go here for more on Town Talks.
Remember the hit movie “The Graduate?” The narrative opens with recent college grad, Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman), trying to figure out what comes next. At a celebration around his parent’s pool, a guest sums up his career in one word: plastics.
But that was then, the 1960s.
Over the decades that followed, every year tens of thousands of tons of plastic waste was and continues to be produced in the United States alone yet, despite the mountains of recycling labels, 85 percent of those plastics end up in landfills. Fact is only about 2 percent of single-use plastics are recycled annually, and what little is recycled is only reused once before those products too wind up in landfills.
Bottom line: the U.S. is woefully unprepared for the scale of its plastic waste problem – but viable solutions are in the works.
Meet.Dr. C. Michael McGuirk.
Dr. C. Michael McGuirk, courtesy Telluride Science.
McGuirk and his team at Colorado School of Mines are hoping that chemical recycling proves to be the solution to our country’s daunting plastic challenge.
Their Big Idea is to use chemical compounds called superacids – which are less scary than they sound – to break plastics down into their base element or small building blocks called polyolefins. Recycling can then be achieved much more efficiently and on a much larger scale than is possible through existing – and relatively ineffectual – practices.
In short, with right infrastructure, chemical recycling with superacids could totally change how we look at recycling and plastic waste.
McGuirk sums up: “We literally have a free store of solid oil – the building block of plastic – sitting in our landfills and if we can figure out how to ‘mine’ that resource out of those discarded plastics, there is a lot of potential as to what we can do with it.”
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