Legend
has it that King Midas turned everything he touched into gold. The engineers at
West Sacramento, CA-based Micromidaswww.micromidas.comuse
hungry bacteria to turn something no one wants to touch - solid human waste -
into something many people treasure: biodegradable plastic.
The
company’s process holds the promise of mitigating three environmental ills: the
ever-increasing amount of solid waste our population generates; the use of
potentially scarce, expensive petroleum to make plastic; and the fate of
plastic packaging that doesn’t make its way into the recycling stream.
What
began several years ago as an Environmental Protection Agency award-winning
research project under Frank Lope at the University of California–Davis
became an independent private enterprise in 2009, and it is already breaking
even.
“Two
years ago, we developed a bench-top-scale proof of concept. We received venture
capital backing last spring, and now we’re at the 1,000-L pilot plant stage,” says
Ryan Smith, Micromidas’ chief technical officer. “The next step will be to go
on site to a municipal waste treatment plant and do a pre-commercial
demonstration to show the economies of scale.”
Currently,
Micromidas sends a truck to several wastewater treatment plants throughout Northern California to collect solid waste that
municipalities would otherwise have to send to landfills. The company runs that
solid waste through an anaerobic digestion process that breaks it down to the
nutrient level. Smith said, “We then feed those nutrients to our ‘superbugs’ in
a bioreactor; they eat massive quantities of the nutrients and, just as humans
store fat, these microbes store polyesters in their bodies. At a certain point,
we harvest the bacteria, run it through an extraction process to derive the polyhydroxyalkanoate
(PHA) resin and sell it to plastics companies.”
Functionally
similar to PP or PS
Smith
noted that the resin is similar in function to polypropylene, adding, “At the
processing level, it behaves much like polystyrene; it can be made into fibers
and may be able to be foamed.”
It
is beginning to be used in manufacturing, he said; one medical device company
has licensed the bioplastic to make internal stents and sutures.
Although
it is fundamentally a plastic, Smith said, the PHA resin has a three-carbon
backbone and produces enzymes that are recognized in nature. A true bioplastic,
Micromidas’ resin has been shown in tests to be marine-biodegradable in less
than 12 months.
“The term ‘bioplastic’ is overused in this industry,”
Smith argued. “It does not have a science-based, commonly agreed-upon definition,
and we have no problem poking the underbelly of that concept.”
-Heidi
Parsons, Senior Editor, Packaging Strategies
Source:Packaging Strategies’ July 31 newsletter. For more
information, visitwww.packstrat.com
