During the 1980s, Thomas Nosker was a doctoral student at Rutgers University who set out to address a mounting problem. It was the rapid accumulation of plastic packaging waste with no practical recycling pathway, according to a Rutgers Research profile of his work. Packaging materials such as plastic were rapidly replacing glass containers on store shelves, and the used bottles were piling up with no practical way to recycle them, so most of it was simply headed for landfills. This material was what Nosker eventually came up with after countless experiments and it is now called structural plastic lumber, a material that can replace wood and steel in their structural forms. Years later, that same material was used to manufacture roughly 1.5 million railroad ties across the United States, keeping an estimated 300 million pounds of plastic out of landfills, waterways and oceans.
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