Petronela Chovancova, IMDEA MATERIALS

The next time you open a yoghurt, peel the film off a ready meal, or throw away a disposable coffee cup, take a moment to consider where that item will end up. In most cases, the honest answer is: it will still be here, in one form or another, long after everyone reading this sentence has disappeared.

For much of the history of synthetic chemistry, the goal was permanence: to create materials that would never corrode, degrade, or change. That is why our takeaway coffee cups are, in many ways, “eternal”. Advanced biodegradable materials, however, completely reverse this logic, turning the ability to disappear cleanly into a designed feature rather than a material failure.

Nature solved this problem billions of years ago by ensuring that every organic molecule is ultimately recycled and returned to the ecosystem. With the support of automated science to accelerate formulation and identify the ideal sustainable combinations, humble materials such as corn, crab shells, and wood pulp are set to become some of the most important biodegradable materials of the next century.

Solutions to a global problem

Conventional plastics, such as polypropylene, PET, and polystyrene, are remarkably durable materials. That durability is precisely what makes them useful and, at the same time, what makes them a global problem.

We produce around 400 million tonnes of plastic every year, and most of it will still be here centuries from now. Arguably, this is plastics’ greatest flaw: their exceptional durability is also the cause of significant environmental impacts and harm to living organisms, since not all plastic waste is recycled.

Instead, plastic gradually breaks down into ever-smaller fragments, creating what we know as microplastics. For this reason, we must rethink the way plastics are used within a fully integrated circular economy.

Materials Designed to Disappear

But what if we could engineer materials with all the useful properties of plastics, the ability to be moulded, coated, formed into films, or loaded with active compounds, while also ensuring they are designed to disappear safely once we have finished using them?

This is the central promise of sustainable, biodegradable materials, one of the key themes highlighted in the SAPEA Evidence Review Report on Advanced Materials.

In theory, “biodegradable” means that a material can be broken down by living organisms, primarily bacteria and fungi, into simpler substances such as water, carbon dioxide, and biomass. In practice, however, it is rarely that straightforward.

A major challenge is that “biodegradable” does not automatically mean “compostable”. Many advanced bioplastics will not decompose in a home compost bin because they require the high temperatures and controlled humidity of industrial composting facilities, while others degrade effectively in soil or aquatic environments. Navigating these differences makes end-of-life management a complex chemical puzzle.

Corn and crab shells

To address this challenge, scientists are exploring an enormous and rapidly expanding library of biodegradable, bio-based polymers. These materials range from naturally occurring proteins and polysaccharides to synthetic biopolymers produced from renewable agricultural feedstocks. The structural and chemical diversity within this library is immense, offering an almost limitless number of ways to design new material properties. However, navigating this vast design space to identify the right combinations is a monumental task.

Consider three common examples: poly(lactic acid) (PLA), produced by fermenting plant sugars such as those found in corn; cellulose, derived from wood pulp; and chitosan, extracted from the shells of crustaceans such as crabs.

Mimicking the transparency and strength of plastic

Each of these building blocks offers unique and complementary structural advantages. PLA replicates the transparency, stiffness, and processability of conventional petroleum-based packaging. Cellulose provides lightweight yet robust mechanical reinforcement, acting as a strong supporting framework. Meanwhile, chitosan contributes natural antimicrobial properties and unique surface charges that interact dynamically with their surroundings.

Although these raw materials are individually renewable and highly tunable, combining them into functional, sustainable composites has traditionally required an exhausting process of manual trial and error. Because these biopolymers can be combined in thousands of different chemical variations, each requiring precise proportions of polymers, plasticisers, and nanofillers, discovering the ideal sustainable formulation has become a major research bottleneck.

Traditional polymer science relies on slow, manual batch testing, introducing human variability, limiting the volume of data collected, and restricting our understanding of how these materials age over time.

This is precisely where high-throughput laboratory automation transforms the field.

The role of robots

Instead of a scientist manually preparing and testing a single formulation over several days, robotic workflows can formulate, combine, and evaluate hundreds of different material compositions simultaneously.

These automated systems continuously record how different formulations respond to humidity, temperature, and mechanical stress in real time. This robotic acceleration enables researchers to rapidly formulate, evaluate, and map the precise mechanistic pathways through which composite plastics degrade.

By systematically generating and analysing these large, high-quality datasets, automation eliminates human variability and narrows the gap between laboratory-scale discovery and the rigorous quality control required for industrial manufacturing.

This allows researchers to bypass decades of trial and error and rapidly identify precisely optimised bioplastic formulations that provide maximum durability throughout a product’s useful life while retaining a molecular architecture that reliably triggers rapid degradation once the material enters the environment.

The coffee cup of the future will no longer be eternal.

Petronela Chovancova, materials science engineer, IMDEA MATERIALS

This article was originally published in The Conversation. Read the original (content in Spanish).