Patricia Aymà Maldonado

So I study their behavior, understand their needs, and design the preferred conditions for them to perform at their best.

So in practice, that means adjusting the environment, the nutrients, the pH, the temperature, the oxygen levels, and even the timing of the growth cycles.

And in my case, I train them to transform industrial organic waste into fully biodegradable, microplastic-free bioplastics.

So, yeah, we've been told for years that recycling will fix everything, but it hasn't.

Only 9% of the wall plastic gets recycled.

The rest is either incinerated, approximately 19%, landfill, 50%, or simply lost.

in the environment that is at 22%.

And here's the shocking part.

The more we recycle, the more virgin plastic we produce.

So plastic is made of long polymer chains.

And when we cut or damage those chains during mechanical recycling, they become shorter.

And that means that the material has fewer possible uses.

Recycling is not a magical solution.

A bottle may become a shampoo bottle at first,

then a playground floor, and then a pipe.

And that's the end of the life.

So mechanical recycling lose quality every cycle.

So it always needs to be blend with new plastic that we call virgin plastic, the plastic that is extracted for the first time from petroleum sources.

So in other words, the system has never designed to reduce production.

It was designed to maintain it.