Breaking Down Silos for Science

Work on biodegradation of Aventa™ illustrates value of collaboration

NORTHAMPTON, MA / ACCESS Newswire / November 17, 2025 / Eastman

Collaboration between Eastman and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) has led to eye-opening scientific results about how quickly certain biopolymers can degrade in seawater. Researcher Collin Ward hopes it opens eyes on other fronts too.

"We hope this pushes the Earth and environmental sciences community to think more broadly about the benefits of breaking down silos and working together," Ward said.

Ward is a WHOI scientist who led a study to measure how quickly cellulose diacetate (CDA) breaks down in marine environments. WHOI worked with scientists from Eastman, which provided funding for the study as well as materials: CDA-based foams made with Eastman Aventa compostable materials.

WHOI researchers found these CDA foams, which have high surface-area-to-volume ratios, biodegrade rapidly in the ocean while also supporting circularity and material efficiency.

"With foaming, you increase the degradation rate by more than 10 times, and you get to a point where this foamed CDA is degrading faster than paper," Ward said. "It turns out that this low-density CDA material is the fastest-degrading plastic we've ever measured in our lab, and we think it's the fastest-degrading plastic to ever be documented in the ocean."

This experiment aside, the partnership itself deserves attention. Eastman has worked for more than five years with WHOI, the world's leading independent, nonprofit scientific organization dedicated to ocean research. Ward, who has a Ph.D. in Earth and environmental sciences, works in biogeochemistry and studies how organic molecules degrade in the environment. His previous work has produced valuable insights on degrading permafrost in the Arctic and the fate of oil during spills at sea, including the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Then he thought about translating his studies of molecular degradation to the plastic waste crisis.

"Around 2017 or so, I was having coffee with a close colleague, Christopher Reddy, another collaborator on the project, and thought, ‘Why don't we take these tools and apply them to study the fate of plastics in the ocean?' " Ward said.

The partnership between WHOI and Eastman launched in January 2020. Scientists started with fundamental questions about the variables and timelines of CDA biodegradation.

"At the time, no one knew if CDA degraded in the ocean, which bugs ate it and how fast the process happened," Ward remembered. "It was only a few years into the project when we had a firm enough grasp of that fundamental knowledge to start thinking about applying it to new products, like Aventa."