Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Chemistry plays an important role in making sure that materials taken from our oceans are not wasted, and any materials that enter our oceans are harmless. Materials entering our oceans and causing harm extend from simple molecules such as carbon dioxide through to macromolecules including commodity plastics. In our laboratory, materials will be made from a bottom-up (small to big) and top-down (big to small) approach using 'green' methods that focus on using carbon dioxide, and non-depleting organic and inorganic building blocks accessible from plants and food waste streams. Depleting building blocks include oil and gas, and mined/quarried minerals. Students will also perform experiments to understand polymer degradation. Catalysts (energy-saving chemicals) will be used to make new polymers (plastics) from carbon dioxide and chemicals sourced from biological feedstocks, via efficient reactions to give a range of new materials. We will be able to tailor them for different uses after they are made using catalysts, or even light. Specialized scientific instruments will be used to improve our understanding of the new materials made and their properties. We anticipate that some of our specially tailored polymers will exhibit interesting behaviour in terms of gelation, self-healing properties and biological activity. We will also target new materials with triggered degradation behaviour or that can be recycled back to starting materials (in order to prevent plastic pollution). In addition to making polymers, we will use a holistic approach by studying fate and degradation of polymers in the environment and by mimicking ingestion (e.g. degradation in sea water, hydrolysis at stomach acid pHs). To this end, collaborations with environmental chemists, chemical biologists and other experts have been established. There are currently critical gaps in nanoplastic research and important discoveries regarding the fate and toxicity of new materials can be made by taking this unified approach to materials chemistry. We will use a low temperature incubator to assess degradation across a range of temperatures (lower temperatures are especially relevant to Canada). Specialized instruments and equipment will be used to measure decreases in polymer molecular weight/size over time and to identify the degradation products (a step that is often missed in current studies). New materials will also be made by isolating minerals from fish processing waste (e.g. fish bones, mussel shells) and new uses will be developed e.g. energy storage devices. These materials (nano- and microcrystals of calcium carbonate and hydroxyapatite) can be used directly in some applications or be altered to give them new properties. This will allow non-depleting inorganic materials to be customized and then used in many areas.