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Biological Upcycling of Plastics Waste
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This review summarizes research on using biological systems -- including enzymes, bacteria, and engineered microbes -- to break down plastic waste into useful chemicals and materials. Rather than traditional recycling that produces lower-quality plastic each time, biological approaches can convert waste plastics into valuable products like biodegradable plastics, fuels, and specialty chemicals, potentially reducing the flow of plastics into the environment where they break into harmful microplastics.
Plastic wastes accumulate in the environment, impacting wildlife and human health and representing a significant pool of inexpensive waste carbon that could form feedstock for the sustainable production of commodity chemicals, monomers, and specialty chemicals. Current mechanical recycling technologies are not economically attractive due to the lower-quality plastics that are produced in each iteration. Thus, the development of a plastics economy requires a solution that can deconstruct plastics and generate value from the deconstruction products. Biological systems can provide such value by allowing for the processing of mixed plastics waste streams via enzymatic specificity and using engineered metabolic pathways to produce upcycling targets. We focus on the use of biological systems for waste plastics deconstruction and upcycling. We highlight documented and predicted mechanisms through which plastics are biologically deconstructed and assimilated and provide examples of upcycled products from biological systems. Additionally, we detail current challenges in the field, including the discovery and development of microorganisms and enzymes for deconstructing non-polyethylene terephthalate plastics, the selection of appropriate target molecules to incentivize development of a plastic bioeconomy, and the selection of microbial chassis for the valorization of deconstruction products.
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When a large batch of papers lands in the Atlas, we read through it and send a short write-up of what stood out.