Bagasse to Biopolymer: PLA Production Facility Design; Who is Blameworthy for the 2018 Uber Collision Fatality: An Analysis of the Extent to Which Regulators Should Be Held Morally Responsible 74 views

My technical work and my STS research projects are related in the way that they both work to understand how corporations and the U.S. government are responsible for the health and safety of the people they serve and how they fall short of such responsibilities. My technical work focuses on how to produce the bioplastic poly(lactic acid) (PLA) for food packaging and specifically how corporations can use this technology versus the ubiquitous petroleum-based plastic packaging to package food. My STS research explains why the U.S. government is morally responsible for keeping its citizens safe while corporations use public roads for autonomous vehicle (AV) testing. Although these two themes are broadly related, it is crucial to identify the different ways corporations and the U.S. government are responsible for the care of the people they serve. The product of my technical work is a design for a chemical plant based in São Paulo, Brazil that takes the sugarcane bagasse waste from a nearby sugarcane production facility and turns that into the bioplastic PLA. This design was based on a paper by Alves et al. (2023). The process is broken down into four main parts: glucose production, lactic acid production, lactide production, and PLA production. Besides the design, my capstone group worked to make sure the plant is a safe place to work at and has minimal environmental impact. My capstone group also ran numbers on the economics of this process and found that the project is not economically viable. However, my capstone group determined ways for the project to be viable with alterations to the process that could improve the work for future groups working on similar technical projects. The purpose of this work is to produce a full design for this plant and incentivize corporations to adopt bioplastic technology for their food packaging. By doing so they are improving their environmental footprint and the health of the people who consume their products. My STS research also explores the topic of moral responsibility except in this case it is the U.S. government’s responsibility towards the safety of its citizens on public roads. My research utilizes the 2018 Uber tragedy in Tempe Arizona and specifically explores how the federal government is morally responsible for not only enacting but strictly enforcing laws associated with autonomous vehicle testing on public roads. Using Van de Poel and Royakkers' (2011) risk-responsibility framework, specifically the criteria of foreseeability and freedom of action, my research claims that both Arizona and federal regulators bear meaningful moral responsibility for Herzberg's death. The goal of my research is to stimulate conversation around AI regulation and the need to strengthen it if citizens are to stay safe from its negative consequences. Working on these two projects together has added value to determining future design and policy choices for industrial bioplastic production. Drawing from the foreseeability criterion from the responsibility framework, I can foresee that due to the energy requirement necessary to break down PLA, investing in an industrial composting facility network throughout the country is necessary if corporations are to rapidly adopt bioplastic technology. If this does not happen, progress cannot be made on the plastic waste crisis because corporations would just be replacing petroleum-based plastics with bioplastics. This illustrates how the adoption of new technology must drive new policy. As conveyed in my STS research, policy cannot lag behind technology adoption otherwise we will create new problems for society. Both of these projects have motivated me to use these insights in my own career. Instead of just engineering new technology, we must determine whether these technologies actually solve problems for our society rather than creating new ones.

BS (Bachelor of Science)

bioplastic; renewable; PLA; biopolymer

School of Engineering and Applied Science Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering Technical Advisor: Eric Anderson STS Advisor: Benjamin Laugelli Technical Team Members: Harkiran Singh, Hannah Hulse, Braeden Di Carlo, Mayu Ovando

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2026-05-06