R&D 100 winner of the day: BioManIAC: Bioplastics Manufacturing with Intelligent Adaptive Control

Oil-derived, single-use plastics are designed to be disposed of immediately after use, but they persist in the environment for much longer. These plastics take decades to degrade and are a huge source of pollution around the world. Despite the urgency to replace traditional plastics with sustainable alternatives, bioplastics are still decades away from meeting the exacting criteria necessary for utility. Competitive, truly biodegradable solutions are too costly and time-consuming to develop with outdated, Edisonian approaches to R&D. BioManIAC, from Los Alamos National Laboratory, is an innovative machine-learning approach that outperforms traditional R&D and accelerates the development of sustainable bioplastics at a fraction of the cost. It enables the discovery of new biopolymers and predicts critical properties and structures faster, cheaper, and more efficiently than any other product on the market. This approach empowers industry actors, old and new, to rapidly introduce innovative and competitive solutions to replace oil-derived plastics with sustainable bio-alternatives. BioManIAC is the key to unlocking a new class of bioplastics that can revolutionize the single-use plastic industry and transition us to a sustainable, circular economy.