The son of a Yankton truck driver took the stage last month at the American Museum of Natural History in New York to accept a $250,000 award for his pioneering work in polymer chemistry.
Frank Leibfarth said his formative South Dakota years helped set him on the path to that stage.
The Blavatnik National Award is the world’s largest unrestricted monetary prize — meaning winners can spend the money on whatever they’d like — for the scientific community. The 41-year-old Leibfarth was chosen as a Blavatnik Chemical Sciences Laureate, one of three people 42 and younger awarded the title by an independent jury of scientists. The field of contenders began with 310 people, representing 161 academic institutions, 18 of whom were chosen as finalists.
Leibfarth is the Royce Murray distinguished term professor of chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He and his team have created technology that can turn the planet’s most commonly discarded plastics into high-value industrial materials. They’ve also created a more effective filter for trapping and removing Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances — PFAS, or “forever chemicals” — from municipal water supplies, and put it to use for one of North Carolina’s most polluted water sources.
In a recent interview with South Dakota Searchlight, the University of South Dakota graduate and former kicker for the Coyote football team talked about how his upbringing prepared him to step outside the cultural mores of Ivy League research and chase his curiosity as a top-tier scientist.
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity:
How did you wind up in chemistry?
Neither of my parents have a four-year degree, so their goal was always for me just to go to college. I would say in high school I never found my passion. After my sophomore year in college, I took organic chemistry and really loved it. It answered a lot of the questions I had about biology, those molecular-level questions about why some things happen.
I ended up doing a research project at a National Science Foundation-funded program in New York City, at Columbia University. I feel like I was very presumptuous at the time. I said to my professor, “Hey, I really like this organic chemistry. I would love to do research in it, and I would also love to travel. But my family doesn’t have money to let me travel, so I need it to be paid for. Also, I’d like to go out of state.”
Luckily, the NSF had programs that allow you to do exactly that. I applied to 10 of them, got rejected by nine of them, but got into the best one.
So the Columbia experience opened the door for a kid from Yankton whose parents didn’t go to college to become a Ph.D. working on our PFAS problem?
Yeah, I would say that, but I’m also a product of USD. It’s a very good state institution. It allowed me to do lots of different things. I was on the varsity football team, but I also could participate in high-level science. There were people who identified my trajectory early on and gave me quite a bit of individual mentoring.
I contrast that with this world of people who have Ivy League educations, who I interact with now on a day-to-day basis. When you’re in that kind of situation early on, you develop a sense for what’s allowed and what’s not within the academic structure. In some ways, because I was not a part of that, I didn’t know what unwritten rules I was breaking along the way. It allowed me to have a little more creative freedom. I feel like I was able to follow my gut a little more than some of the people who’d grown up in that atmosphere.
What drew you to PFAS and microplastics, to making new things out of our waste?
I really liked the idea of making things, partially because of my dad. He was a truck driver, but he always had a second job where he would refinish basements and things, because he was also a carpenter. I always worked with him and I enjoyed making things with my hands.
Plastics were great, because I would make things and get to hold them after I was done. I could pull them and push them and see what properties they had. That’s what drew me early on. And once I started working in that area, it was very clear to me, and honestly to the whole field, that the sustainability crisis and plastics needed urgent solutions.
Tell us about your work in what you call ‘upcycling’ plastic.
The key challenge is we’re worst at recycling the plastics we make the most of, two related plastics called polyethylene and polypropylene. Polyethylene is like what your milk jug is made out of. Polypropylene is more like the outside of your car, your harder plastic. In two days, we can fill up a football stadium with the amount of these plastics we make in the world.
The number and scale of the factories that are already installed to make this stuff is going to be effectively impossible to supplant. So I thought, could we create better recycling technology for that class of plastics? Our idea was to take all the plastic waste that is generated, and to be able to do this chemical process to it, which makes the products of that process more valuable than the original material was. That’s why we call it upcycling.
What gives it its higher value? What’s it used for?
We can take polyethylene, or a milk jug, and turn it into a really durable material that typically is used for high-end plumbing piping, or the outside of really high voltage wires. If you have a new home, it’s the piping that goes from your hot water heater around your house, because copper got too expensive.
We were also able to turn mixed plastic waste into a really tough material that’s typically used as the second layer in a golf ball. That material is pretty unique. So again, if you can make it from waste, there’s a lot of value there.
The key is to be a revenue stream for recycling centers, because currently, recycling plastic is an economically losing proposition.
What can you tell us about your work with PFAS?
That was born out of problems in North Carolina. It was found in 2017 that the Cape Fear River had really high levels of PFAs, and the Cape Fear River feeds the third largest town in our state, Wilmington, North Carolina. A senator from the state Legislature came to our faculty meeting — which is a very odd thing that never happens — and essentially said, “Hey, we recognize this problem.”
I had an idea about how we could remove it from water better than current technologies. I worked on it for two years in our lab, did a small research project, published a paper, and we kind of thought that was going to be the end of it. But when the results came out, we got a call from the state senator. That initiated discussions with a whole group of legislators, and in the 2021-2022 budget cycle, they allocated $10 million to start what we call the NC Pure Center. Our legislative remit was to develop new materials that remove PFAS from water, scale them up and test them in at least three municipal water treatment plants.
How does the technology work?
What we developed is like what’s used in a Brita filter that goes in your fridge. It’s a material that you pack in a column and flow water through it. The water going into that column has PFAS in it. Our material adsorbs or soaks up the PFAS, and the water coming out should be clean. You can have the same amount of material, and it’ll work 35% longer, compared to current technology.
The EPA set regulations for PFAS about a year and a half ago. It’s estimated that there’s over 6,000 treatment plants in the country that are going to have to implement treatment. So our technologies are one option.
What do you plan to do with the proceeds of your award?
The piece of the puzzle we haven’t yet put into place is to get what we make in our lab into the hands of real people to make them healthier and able to live more sustainably. I want to use the unrestricted funding to help push that forward, and in the process learn how to do it so I can repeat the process throughout my career and make the largest positive impact possible.
What do you want to see change as a result of what you’re doing in this area, 50 years from now?
If my sole job was running a company, my goal would be to run that company well, to make money for the company. And hopefully a byproduct of that would be the sustainability aspect. But since my primary job is in education, my main output is education. If I can educate 50 people, 80 people who can do a similar type of work, that impact can be magnified many times.
Can you talk a little bit about the importance of federal funding for science from that point of view?
The federal government has in the past been really generous with science funding, but also it’s a drop in the bucket. A large pharma company spends more per year in research and development than the entire U.S. budget for science. But a lot of the initial ideas for the innovations that come out of the U.S. that support our economy, make better medicines, make our world more sustainable, those start in academia because of the funding provided by these federal organizations. We’re the ones who can think 10 years out, 20 years out. A pharma company or a chemical company has to think about their next quarter’s profit, their next year, their next two years.
That’s always been the balance that has really kept the U.S. at the forefront of innovation. If we compromise that funding on either end, we’re going to really compromise this delicate balance. Cutting science funding now is going to hurt our economy tremendously in five or 10 years. There’s no way to get around that.
South Dakota Searchlight is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. South Dakota Searchlight maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Seth Tupper for questions: info@southdakotasearchlight.com.