A new recycling process enlists the help of bacteria to turn the ubiquitous plastic PET into a biodegradable plastic that could replace the cellophane in food packaging.PET, is one of the most familiar kinds of plastic: Billions of pounds of PET bottles are sold every year all over the world. But less than a quarter of those are recycled, according to a 2006 study by the trade group the National Association for PET Container Resources.
Getting high-quality material, such as plastics suitable for packaging food or beverages, back out of recycled plastic is more expensive than making virgin PET, so most plastic bottles are recycled into lower-grade, and less valuable, plastic.
But there’s only so much demand for lower-grade plastics, says microbiologist and coauthor Kevin O’Connor of University College Dublin in Ireland. “The problem is that the market for recycled PET is saturated.”
New ways of turning PET into valuable materials, or “up-cycling” it, could create an incentive to recycle more of it. Even better would be if the products of this recycling were biodegradable, as is PHA. PHA demand could grow to a point where it could absorb a slice of the PET waste, while PET to PHA is not the sole answer to PET recycling, it can be part of the solution.
