Millions of tons of bags, bottles, and other plastic items get tossed in the trash every year. All that waste piles up in landfills, where it can take hundreds of years to decompose. But Sandra Pascoe Ortiz, a chemical engineer at the Universidad del Valle de Atemajac in Mexico, may have a solution. She’s created a biodegradable plastic from cactus leaves that quickly breaks down in the environment.
Pascoe makes the material by extracting thick green juice from prickly pear leaves. She combines the juice with wax and other natural substances to form a polymer—a substance made up of large molecules with repeating units. Once spread into a thin film and allowed to dry, the mixture becomes a strong, flexible plastic-like material.
The cactus plastic takes about a month to break down in soil and a few days to dissolve in water. And because it’s nontoxic and plant-based, animals—which sometimes mistake discarded plastic for food—can eat it without being harmed, says Pascoe.