Kickstart: Upcycling of chip bags

The recycling of potato chip bags. That really gets to a dilemma of our convenience food, convenience packaging lifestyle.

Should we feel a little less guilty about eating chips if we can recycle the thin film packaging?

PepsiCo has been talking about its "Lay's RePlay" initiative to recycle the chip bags and turn them into soccer/football pitches around the world.

The first one opened in South Africa this year, with plans for more in Turkey, Russia, Brazil and the United Kingdom.

The company says it used about 3 million chip bags for the South African field, creating rubberized pellets for a shock-absorbent layer under artificial turf.

Pepsi says the process saves about 128 tons of greenhouse gas emissions compared with standard artificial turf pitches. That's the equivalent of taking 27 cars off the road for a year, not to mention finding a reuse for hard-to-recycle snack food packaging.

Of course, we all have to eat 3 million bags of chips — and the dietary impact of that — to accomplish the recycling feat.

University of Toronto professor and microplastics researcher Chelsea Rochman says retrofitting clothes washing machines with filters could make a big dent in catching microfibers — considered a form of microplastics — before they get into the environment.

Rochman's research lab at the university partnered with the environmental group Georgian Bay Forever to install the filters on 97 homes in the small Ontario town of Parry Sound to test out lab research that suggested the filters could cut releases by up to 85 percent.

In a paper and news release last month, they said they believe it worked. Scientists detected what they called a significant, 41 percent drop in synthetic and natural microfibers coming out of the town's water treatment plant.

Rochman told a Canadian TV news program that she sees it strengthening the case for redesigning washing machines.

"[It] gives us a lot of hope for policies that may change how washing machines are made so that filters are put on ... before we purchase them from the store," she said.

State legislators in California have proposed a bill that would require washing machines to install microfiber filters, and it's being considered in Australia and other countries.

A urethane film that its maker says is 100 percent recyclable is helping a team of student engineers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign build a solar-powered car and make its manufacturing more sustainable by cutting out painting.

Aero Sustainable Material Technology, which makes the film, said the university's car competed in the American Solar Challenge, where it scored the team's highest finish of third in the qualifier race and fourth in the main race.

"The Aero lightweight film allowed us to coat and decorate the car without heavy spray paint, and the film itself was much easier to apply compared to spray painting," said Hongbo Yuan, one of the students on the team, in a news release from Aero.

The company has its eyes on the electric vehicle market. It said as the auto industry builds new factories from the ground up for electric vehicles, there's a better chance of getting the film technology in production lines because they don't need to replace existing painting systems.