US rail ties have kept pounds of plastic out of landfills. Image credits: Wikimedia Commons
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. Nosker holds more than 82 U.S. patents and pending patent applications related to plastic lumber and its manufacturing processes, according to Rutgers, work that has generated substantial licensing revenue for the university over the decades.
It was the rapid accumulation of plastic packaging waste with no practical recycling pathway, according to a Rutgers Research profile of his work. Both companies manufacture railroad ties and building materials from the recycled composite, according to Rutgers. During the 1980s, Thomas Nosker was a doctoral student at Rutgers University who set out to address a mounting problem. 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. Rutgers has since licensed the technology to two firms, AXION International Inc. of Zanesville, Ohio, and Sicut Enterprises Limited, based in London. In addition to railway ties, plastic lumber has found use on docks, picnic benches, park benches and parking bollards all over the U.S. and internationally. The Chicago Transit Authority has used the ties on its elevated tracks for track repair in an urban setting. He is currently working on the development of plastic composites reinforced by graphene for making light yet strong materials for use in vehicles and military applications. Even so, the plastic lumber project remains among Nosker’s most visible contributions, a solution to a packaging waste problem that began with two of the most common items in American refrigerators and fast-food bags: a plastic milk jug and a foam sandwich box.
