Solving the Impossible: How Two College Students Created Plastic From Greenhouse Gases

After ten years, thousands of hours at dead end jobs and an endless amount of heart, two young American scientists have finally cracked the code for cost-effectively making plastic from thin air. Well, sort of.

During late 2003, Princeton University student Mark Herrema came across a newspaper article covering the increase in methane emissions from dairy farms, but unlike many others who read the same article that day, Herrema was struck with an impressive idea: he could reduce methane levels (and global warming) by pulling carbon-based matter from the air and recycling it into plastic.

What then sounded like an impossible concept nearly was - scientists had been trying to do exactly the same thing for decades. And, in reality, they’d found success. But the problem was that the process for doing so was incredibly expensive; so much so that it was rendered unviable for the mass market. So, Herrema enlisted the help of friend and Northwestern University bio-medical engineering student Kenton Kimmel, and together they set out to create what is now known as Newlight Technologies.

Methane, the second most prevalent greenhouse gas emitted from the US, is not kind to the environment. Globally, agriculture systems are the leading producer of methane, of which livestock and dairy farms are the majority. In fact, a 2011 USDA study of a 10,000-cow dairy production facility in Iowa found that the single organization released more than 33,000 pounds of methane per day!

Naturally, the impact of a cost-effective methane-recycling process was not only appealing from an altruistic sense, but also from a profitability perspective. As the barriers to entry were huge, so was the manufacturing potential. Herrema and Kimmel achieved the impossible with a 10-times faster bio-catalyst. Now with their introduction of AirCarbon, Newlight Technologies has become the envy of many a green manufacturing engineer.

Currently, Newlight has two factories slated to manufacture a range of products - from plastic chairs to Virgin Mobile cell phone cases - throughout 2014. But having caught the eye of many investors, there’s a significant possibility that we see Newlight and it’s all-star cast of C-suite doctorates, grow exponentially sooner rather than later.