Despite decades of advances in polymer manufacturing and recycling, most plastic materials are still difficult to recover at end of life, with only a small fraction successfully recycled and the majority accumulating in landfills or the environment. These challenges motivate the development of new material platforms that can be produced from abundant biological resources while offering additional end-of-life pathways such as biodegradation. Thermoformable biopolymer assemblies, or bioplastics, represent a promising class of materials that can be produced directly from biological cells or tissues (biomatter) without extensive extraction or refining steps. The most significant limitation in the ability to design these bioplastics is a poor understanding of the fundamental mechanisms controlling the transformation of biomatter to cohesive bioplastics.

This Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer our Future (DMREF) grant supports research that will combine high-throughput data capture, multiscale modeling, and machine learning to understand the molecular and chemical mechanisms controlling the transition from organism to bioplastic during processing. With that understanding, design pathways will be developed to tailor the processing and composition of the initial structure to control the macroscopic properties, and degradation that occurs during and after use. The broader impacts of this work include advancing U.S. leadership in materials innovation, AI-enabled manufacturing, and sustainable production technologies. The project will also contribute to workforce development by providing interdisciplinary training and mentorship opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students, engaging students in research at the intersection of materials science, data science, and advanced manufacturing, and supporting outreach activities in STEM fields.