“We ourselves created this problem”: a Russian-speaking immigrant in Alaska has developed a unique alternative to plastic

Philip Amstislavsky, a professor at the University of Alaska and an enthusiastic ecologist, enjoys spending time in the woods and fishing. Philip wants to save humanity from harmful waste, he invented organic material with the properties of foam and hopes to introduce it into mass production. He told his story Voice of America.

Photo: video frame YouTube / Voice of America

In Alaska, fishing and hunting is not a luxury, as we imagine it in more southern latitudes, but a necessity, because Alaska does not have a well-developed agricultural culture. What connects us is the ocean and ocean health. Plastic and microplastics not only affect the health of flora and fauna systems, but are also a serious threat to human health. We decided to work on this problem and find a solution.

My name is Philip Amstislavsky, I am a researcher and professor of health at the University of Alaska in Anchorage. I am researching biomaterials and green technologies that could be adopted and adapted in Alaska and other northern regions.

Photo: video frame YouTube / Voice of America

I was born in Yekaterinburg, in the Urals. Then we lived in the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Okrug on the Yamal Peninsula. If it is not north, then I do not know what is north.

We have created a huge problem for ourselves. Plastic is a convenient material that has taken the world by surprise over the last 100 years. We don't know how to handle it because it's new material. It's not like wool or metal or, say, glass. This is something we haven't dealt with before.

Photo: video frame YouTube / Voice of America

Photo: video frame YouTube / Voice of America

“Fish contains amino acids that support the functioning of our brain and our entire body; it is a protein that is easily absorbed by both the body of a child and the body of an adult,” says Elena Roic, Philip’s wife. “The main problem is that plastic that gets into the water breaks down into smaller pieces that end up in animal meat. When we eat, this plastic gets into us. We don’t even know about it or see it, but it’s there.”

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Let's say you come to Alaska, you catch your treasured salmon. How will you deliver it to your native Detroit? Or to Sydney? Or in Tokyo? - Philip argues. Now these environmentally friendly fish fly in very environmentally dirty foam boxes. I approached this from a design thinking perspective: how can you solve a complex problem that has so many components? I began to look for an organism that could work with us: penicillin, beer, Russian kvass - these are mushroom products. Over thousands of years, we have created symbioses with fungi.

I had a friend named John Adams, who was an amateur mycologist and an avid mushroom picker. We came up with the idea of ​​taking lignocellulose (the main components of a tree) and sprouting mycelium through it. And see what properties this material will have. Can a mushroom be tamed so that we can produce materials with it, and what kind of mushroom it should be. Why was it so interesting? Because it is a problem that is in front of you.

Photo: video frame YouTube / Voice of America

When I moved to Northern Alaska, I spent my first year working as the director of a health care group that served indigenous communities in the Arctic Circle. Each of these villages has the same problem: before your plane even lands there, you see a landfill. The main component of this garbage is plastic. All its forms, including polystyrene foam. The indigenous people who have lived in this ecology for the last 10 thousand years understand this problem very clearly and clearly. And everyone wants a solution. But there were no technological alternatives to plastic. This is where we found our niche.

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Photo: video frame YouTube / Voice of America

Lena is my wife. We met her several years ago in Homer, Alaska, when she flew here from distant Arkhangelsk to participate in a graduate school for PhD students from all over the Arctic, which was organized by the University of Norway for students of public health and epidemiology. I taught at this school and we met there. Then I visited Lena in Arkhangelsk, then she came to New York, then I visited her in Arkhangelsk again, and last year, last fall we decided to get married.

Photo: video frame YouTube / Voice of America

She came to America with her two daughters, Ira and Anya, and my two daughters, Noah and Benya (Benjamin), were with me. We created this new reality together. The four slowly began to see each other as siblings, which was unique because they were so different.

I am developing biomaterials. Biomaterials are now a fairly well-known concept, which includes materials that are not made synthetically, like most of the things we wear now, and this is an alternative to such technologies. My goal is to create technologies that create no or minimal damage to the environment and perform functions similar to those of the materials we use now that have been synthetically manufactured.

For example, the question of how to create a surface that will repel water is a non-trivial task. Because mushrooms often absorb water, water is a source of nutrition for them. How do you create surfaces that will actually repel water rather than attract it, because you don't want boxes that will suck up water? Our research is aimed at identifying different types of plastic and determining its quantity in the coastal strip. First of all, we are trying to find out where plastic appears in the environment and find environmentally friendly replacements for it.

Photo: video frame YouTube / Voice of America

For many years I traveled with my dad around the Russian North on his expeditions. He was an ichthyologist and worked on the problems of the North, including salmon. We climbed mountain rivers, descended through rapids, it was terribly interesting, a little scary, and probably this gradually becomes part of the genetic code. Love for the North is something you gain. I think that's what happened to me. In Alaska they call it “thrust to the north.”

“It’s very close to the North, where I grew up, where my roots are,” says Elena. — There are a lot of similarities between Alaska and the north of Russia: fish, mushrooms, caviar, love for the forest, plus there are also mountains, very beautiful mountains. Alaska is a large state, people here travel either by water, by car, or by air. It is simply impossible to get to most populated areas. Not far from us there is a lake on which planes land both in summer and winter, and the sound of flying planes is here all the time.”

Photo: video frame YouTube / Voice of America

In 90, when perestroika began and emigration for Russian Jews was open, we moved to Israel. I started looking for myself and went to travel the world. First I ended up in Northern Europe, then in Los Angeles, then in New York. At some point I decided that I wanted to pursue environmental design. I entered graduate school (PhD), and, having completed it, began to look for work in a place where the problems of climate change, environmental design, and ecology coincided. Alaska is an ideal place in this regard. There is everything here, and everything is exaggerated. When you see a glacier melting because we had an unusually hot summer, you can't avoid it. It affects your real life.

Mushrooms in the forest have many functions and are an integral part of the ecosystem. One of the important things that fungi do is to break down complex organic molecules into their component chemical elements so that the elements of the tree can be used by plants and animals for the next cycle of life. In our century, our reality, they have an additional role. The process begins in the forest with the search for the right mushroom that can befriend us and serve as the basis for material with the qualities we need. Then he goes to the laboratory, where we work in sterile conditions to grow the mycelium into a layer (board). The board itself is so rigid that you can stand on it. When we cut this board, it turns into 6 pieces. These parts are inserted into a box, it becomes a container into which the salmon plunges and flies in a direction unknown to us. We put a sensor in the box,
which gives us the opportunity to find out how the temperature of the fish changed during its travel around the world.

We are trying to introduce an innovative product into the economic system of Alaska and America that has not existed before. It started with a small grant of $25 from the University of Alaska. Then we received funding from the big oil company ConocoPhillips - they understand that the era of oil is coming to an end and it is important for their survival to invest in alternative technologies. Then we received a small grant from a federal program that funds research and commercialization of technologies in the United States.

Polystyrene foam is really the cheapest at the moment. But the question is: who pays? If we look at the price from the ecosystem side, the price is very high, it increases very quickly.

One of the problems that many researchers face is a lack of knowledge and understanding of the law that governs patents. Any invention must be protected from copying. We understand this all intuitively. The American Patent Office reviews each application for several years, and in 2016 we began this process. He's important. This is the only way you can create viability of an idea by creating some capital around it. A patent is something that can then be used to create licensing. A company that has the technological base to produce our materials can come to us and we can sell that technology so that they can produce it in another region of the world.

Photo: video frame YouTube / Voice of America

Unfortunately, our situation at the university is in jeopardy because Alaska Governor Mark Dunleavy has adopted a dialogue stance that denies climate change and the need for a university addressing climate change issues. Reducing the university budget affects our work, our ability to attract creative people and scientists who will continue to work with us. So we decided to go beyond the university and create a startup to make this technology possible. We will create a small experimental biofactory where all these technologies will be put into practice. We plan to produce enough boxes by next May so that the fishing companies we work with now can buy them from us so that their sector of the market will be satisfied with it. I think we are close to the point where we will be able to produce material and objects from biomaterial that can be produced on a mass scale.

Photo: video frame YouTube / Voice of America

At the moment, many ecosystems of our planet are under enormous threat. They are disappearing. I would like to devote the following years of my work to the creation of projects and studies that would create a symbiosis, and not a conflict between human activity and nature. We would like our children to be able to participate in a world where such an understanding exists and where they can develop and live an interesting, healthy and creative life. I think this is the main reason why I get up every morning and I am still interested in this work.

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