Ludmilla Aristilde

Let me see if I can use my machinery that I already have to degrade something else.

Let's see if I can munch on this plastic as a source of food.

Yes, and so there are multiple steps to think about.

There is first, how do we turn the polymer that I talked about?

So how do you turn your plastic bottle, for example, or your plastic bag, or your plastic jug of containers into something that is micro and nano scale?

And then that's one step.

And there are enzymes that can do that, but chemical engineers have also developed

chemical treatments that can break that down into smaller pieces.

And then you have the second part is to take those things that are pre-degraded, either using enzymes, which can be sourced from microbes or using chemical treatments, we're just using a special chemical.

Then we take that, you know, that product and then we feed it to microbes.

Now, as you rightly pointed out, microbes are very tiny.

When they're actually using this naturally, they're using it just for their little microscopic bodies.

They're not doing it for the benefit of society, which is huge.

Yeah.

to do that is to concentrate the waste stream so you have a stream of plastic waste you will concentrate it into a bioreactor in order to have just the microbes that can do it because in the environment there's a lot of competition of microbes with other things and other food sources yeah

So the way to do this, I think, will be to leverage using bioreactors to do this.

The other thing to think about is that we can engineer the microbe to do it even faster or better or to do it even more than what they would do naturally.

This is why a lot of

As scientists, including me and other groups, we are trying to understand what is the machinery of this bacterium, like what is the metabolism, what is the pathway, what are the genes are involved so that we can actually engineer those pathways and those genes to make them do what we want as a society for them to do for us.

Yes, I like to think of it as one of the ways if we're gonna tackle the issue, I think any major issue or global issue shouldn't be tackled with one solution.