ERA-IB5 14-071 OXYPOL Optimised laccase systems for high-value bio-plastics from biomass

With a global production > 300 mill ton/year , plastics are an important contributor to increased greenhouse gas emissions. However the use of plastics contributes to e.g. lighter vehicles and better preservation of food and water and is as such a good alternative to meet the demand from the growing population.

Bio-plastics will bring the best from two worlds, combining the material properties of petrochemical-based materials with a better eco-footprint. The bio-based plastics market has grown tremendously in recent years, with global production expected to reach more than 1.5 million tons/year by 2018.

Plastics are made up of what are known as 'building block molecules'. This project aims to develop enzymes that will break down lignin (e.g. from plants, or from the pulp and paper industry) into the building blocks required to produce bio-plastics. This is a pan-European project, with partners from 6 European countries, all with valuable expertise in different parts of the lignin to plastic production cycle.

These days, the bio-based plastics market is in rapid growth, and bio-based plastic products will more and more replace petroleum-based plastic products, leading to reduced CO2 emissions and herewith a positive environmental impact. The use of biocatalysts (enzymes) in the bio-plastics production value chain has the potential to add largely to this positive impact as it may substitute toxic chemical catalysts in processes using to produce polymers from bio-based feedstock. Lignin is the largest available source of aromatic building blocks for bio-based aromatic derivatives, and its abundance, e.g. from the pulp and paper industry, makes it a highly interesting potential source for novel aromatic chemicals and polymer precursors that may be polymerized by chemical and biocatalysts.

The OXYPOL project addresses the bio-based plastics value chain using biocatalysis for the degradation of lignin into aromatic building blocks and the subsequent controlled polymerization of these aromatic precursors into bio-based polymers. Highly efficient laccase mediator systems (LMS) based on abundant potential low-cost mediator compounds directly derivable from selected lignin preparations will be developed, applying enzyme engineering strategies. In combination with improving enzyme-recycling approaches for LMS involving immobilization on polymer particles and whole-cell biocatalysis, we aim at breaking crucial bottlenecks in the application of LMS based
biocatalysis towards large scale industrial applications in bio-plastics production.

OXYPOL is a pan-European endeavour integrating complementaryscientific excellence and market driven R&D competence of the totally 8 academic, institutional and commercial project partners, aiming at making an impact on the biocatalysis-based bio-plastics production, with positive implications for the European bio-economy.

In particular, OXYPOL will enable more efficient, scalable, safer and more environmentally friendly bio-plastics manufacturing processes by targeting optimized, specific and cost-efficient biocatalysis both for precursor production and subsequent polymerization.

Central to OXYPOL is the development of new, highly efficient low-cost laccase/mediator systems (LMS) for the controlled biocatalytic depolymerisation of lignin.OXYPOL will access and develop further, previously described as well as new to discover microbial laccases for their optimal function in innovative LMS, feeding from abundant natural low-cost mediator compounds. Specially treated lignin fractions from the crop Miscanthus x giganteus will be the cheap and scalable source of mediators in new LMS for lignin depolymerisation, thus representing a conceptual internal feedback loop in the project. Optimized LMS will, along with established chemical routes, in addition be deployed in the subsequent polymerisation into new bio-polymers of high aromatics content for bioplastics production. Through enzyme recycling and low-cost scalable enzyme production, R&D on laccase immobilization and whole cell biocatalysis included in OXYPOL,will contribute to the definition of more economical processes for lignin and LMS-based bio-polymer product generation up to the large industrial scale.