New biological and chemical processes are desperately needed to refine and upcycle man-made plastics, which represent a growing environmental crisis for the planet, especially in marine environments. This talk will focus on recent advances on the enzymatic, microbial, and chemo-catalytic conversion of synthetic plastics, especially those used for single-use applications with intended lifetimes of minutes to hours. In particular, recent discoveries of bacterial systems able to grow on man-made plastics offer a foothold for synthetic biology to provide solutions for efficient biological upcycling of waste plastic. Moreover, the ability to combine reclaimed and catalytically processed single-use plastics with bio-based monomers offers a strategy for developing new, upcycled materials with much longer lifetimes and higher value than single-use plastics, while simultaneously providing incentive for further investment in the bioeconomy.

Biological and catalytic strategies for plastics upcycling

2019 Fall National Meeting

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