Sometimes you can take two problems, add them together, and get a win-win solution. In this case, here are the two problems:
First, as cities expand we create more waste and more sewage, and we don’t have any really good plan for it. And second, we keep making more and more plastic that never goes away, filling landfills or swimming in oceanic garbage patches. So, what’s the natural solution? Why not turn the poop into plastic that biodegrades? Simple, right? Actually, yes. It turns out it is.
Ryan Smith is CTO of Micromidas, and he turns poop into plastic for a living. “We take raw sewage from a waste water treatment plant and we convert it to biodegradable plastic.” He says it is “just a series of tanks, nothing complicated or fancy about it. Nothing that is technically too difficult.” That’s because he gets bacteria to do the hard work for him, and that’s the novelty of his product.
Finding the bacteria, and mixing them up into the right combination, that’s a different story.
Right now, most plastic comes from petroleum. So as you tear open that new SD card from its packaging, or toss out the packing foam from your last Amazon order, you are, in essence consuming oil.
There are various sugar- or corn-based bioplastics on the market already. These starch-based plastics solve the problem of living forever in a landfill or garbage patch, but if produced at the volume of petro-plastic, they would significantly drive up the price of corn or sugarcane.
So a better solution, and the innovation here, is that Micromidas’ bioplastic adds sewage treatment to the enviro-benefits, and leaves corn out of the mix. It just so happens that’s also good for the bottom line. Via GOOD
