Creating sustainable biopolymers from mixed plastic waste pollution

Plastic usage will double by 2036, yet \>70% is unrecyclable and \>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).