<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><ns2:project xmlns:ns1="http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk/gtr/api" xmlns:ns2="http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk/gtr/api/project" xmlns:ns3="http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk/gtr/api/fund" xmlns:ns4="http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk/gtr/api/person" xmlns:ns5="http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk/gtr/api/project/outcome" xmlns:ns6="http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk/gtr/api/organisation" ns1:created="2026-06-03T15:52:43Z" ns1:href="http://gtr.ukri.org/gtr/api/projects/5BEADFBA-0F21-4055-9FF3-6F31F425C9BC" ns1:id="5BEADFBA-0F21-4055-9FF3-6F31F425C9BC"><ns1:links><ns1:link ns1:href="http://gtr.ukri.org/gtr/api/persons/20B7E6D9-2EAE-472D-BBF4-0CF21B027571" ns1:rel="PM_PER"/><ns1:link ns1:href="http://gtr.ukri.org/gtr/api/organisations/D3045038-BC48-4879-B77D-185CA279893E" ns1:rel="LEAD_ORG"/><ns1:link ns1:href="http://gtr.ukri.org/gtr/api/organisations/2EBCC169-13F8-4E3A-B92F-95BE8AC88DF6" ns1:rel="PARTICIPANT_ORG"/><ns1:link ns1:href="http://gtr.ukri.org/gtr/api/organisations/D3045038-BC48-4879-B77D-185CA279893E" ns1:rel="PARTICIPANT_ORG"/><ns1:link ns1:end="2021-06-29T23:00:00Z" ns1:href="http://gtr.ukri.org/gtr/api/funds/D4314680-57F0-4296-B41D-5057D73980C1" ns1:rel="FUND" ns1:start="2020-03-31T23:00:00Z"/></ns1:links><ns2:identifiers><ns2:identifier ns2:type="RCUK">43285</ns2:identifier></ns2:identifiers><ns2:title>Creating sustainable biopolymers from mixed plastic waste pollution</ns2:title><ns2:status>Closed</ns2:status><ns2:grantCategory>Study</ns2:grantCategory><ns2:leadFunder>Innovate UK</ns2:leadFunder><ns2:abstractText>Plastic usage will double by 2036, yet \&amp;gt;70% is unrecyclable and \&amp;gt;94% is still produced from virgin hydrocarbons.

Despite growing social momentum for a plastics circular economy, re-processing of mixed plastic waste (MPW) is extremely challenging. Waste-to-energy (W2E) technology offers a stepping stone technology, extracting value from MPW but at high environmental cost (CO2 production) and is a fundamentally open-loop process (low on the waste hierarchy).

Cyanetics will engineer a new strain of cyanobacteria to fixate CO2 from waste exhaust gas arising from MPW processing to create industrially valuable, sustainable, plastics alternative materials. CO2 production arising from both stop-gap W2E technologies and emergent chemical recycling represents an open loop loss to a plastics circular economy model. We will design process technology based on this strain which will harvest this waste gas, returning it to the plastics value chain (to chemical manufactures) as a sustainably produced bio-plastics (PLA-precursor) which is both bio-degradable and recyclable (by the produced process).</ns2:abstractText></ns2:project>