A young inventor's plan to recycle Styrofoam | Ashton Cofer

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 24 October 2017

⏱️ 6 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

From packing peanuts to disposable coffee cups, each year the US alone produces some two billion pounds of Styrofoam -- none of which can be recycled. Frustrated by this waste of resources and landfill space, Ashton Cofer and his science fair teammates developed a heating treatment to break down used Styrofoam into something useful. Check out their original design, which won both the FIRST LEGO League Global Innovation Award and the Scientific American Innovator Award from Google Science Fair.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This TED Talk features inventor Ashton Koffer, recorded live at TED-Ed Weekend, 2016.
0:14.0	It was just an ordinary Saturday. My dad was outside mowing the lawn. My mom was upstairs folding laundry.
0:24.6	My sister was in a room doing homework, and I was in the basement playing video games. And as I came upstairs to get something to drink, I looked out the window and realized that there was something that I was supposed to be doing, and this is what I saw.
0:48.2	No, this wasn't my family's dinner on fire. This was my science project. Flames were pouring out,
0:53.9	smoke was in the air, and it looked like a wooden deck was about to catch fire. I immediately started yelling. My mom was
0:55.4	freaking out. My dad ran around and put out the fire. And of course, my sister started recording
1:01.0	a Snapchat video. This was just the beginning of my team's science project. My team is composed of me
1:09.7	and three other students who are here in the audience
1:11.9	today. We competed in First Lego League, which is an international Lego robotics competition for kids.
1:18.6	And in addition to a robotics game, we also worked on a separate science project, and this was the
1:23.7	project that we were working on. So the idea for this project all started when a few months earlier,
1:28.3	a couple of my teammates took a trip to Central America
1:31.3	and saw beaches littered with styrofoam or expanded polystyrene foam.
1:36.3	And when they came back and told us about it,
1:38.3	we really started thinking about the ways in which we see styrofoam every day.
1:42.3	Get a new flat-screen TV? You end up with a block of styrofoam every day. Get a new flat screen TV, you end up with a block of
1:45.3	styrofoam bigger than the TV itself. Drink a cup of coffee, where those styrofoam coffee cups
1:50.6	are sure going to add up. And where do all these items go after their one-time use? Since there
1:56.3	are any good existing solutions for use styrofoam, almost all of them end up riding the landfill or the
2:02.2	oceans and beaches, taking over 500 years to degrade. And in fact, every year, the U.S. alone produces
2:08.6	over 2 billion pounds of styrofoam, filling up a staggering 25% of landfills. So why do we have
2:15.0	these gross accumulations of styrofoam waste? Why can't we just
	...

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