‘Generator’ Turns Plastic Trash Into Edible Protein

August 4, 2021 Off By Sebastian Reisig

Most recently, two scientists have won the 1 million euro 2021 Future Insight Prize in the process by creating a food ‘generator’ concept that turns plastics into protein.

The names behind the project, which was initially funded by a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) cooperative agreement award for $7.2 million over four years, are Ting Lu, a professor of bioengineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Stephen Techtmann, associate professor of biological sciences at Michigan Technological University.

Dr. Lu and Dr. Techtmann are working with bacteria that naturally break down plastics into protein. Their immediate goal is to further their work on communities that can process polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastics, also known as polyester. The slow growth rates of these microbes have limited their use in the past, but Lu and Techtmann are engineering depolymerization enzymes to be more efficient, improving the ability of microbes to break down PET. In the future, they will expand that research to cover more plastics to tackle the issues of plastic pollution and feeding a growing population in tandem.