Also we thought about what we can do to reduced contamination risks if our projet would become real.
One application of our project is to use it in small to medium enclosed industrial plants. The most efficient location would be either near water or in the ocean, where the microparticles are the most present. The plant would function as follows : the water containing micro- and macro-particles of plastic enters the plant and is put in a first container where the bacteria are located. The plastic is digested and the fluid moves on to the second compartment after filtration. In this compartment, Erythromycin A will be extracted. In normal conditions people would not be directly exposed to the bacteria.

We also thought of the possibility of using our bacteria before the plastic ends up in the ecosystem, at recycling facilities. Here, the bacteria would be in direct contact with solid plastic.
If our project were fully developed into a PlastiCure factory, we would have to be very careful that the modified strain of E.coli does not leave the plant and ends up in the ecosystem. This would be the main issue with our project. In order to reduce the risk of a leak into the ecosystem, we would implement a filtration system. The plant would have to be perfectly sealed. Talking with the Paris-Saclay team during the Bordeaux meetup, they advised us that we had better to use a compartiment with two filters to be safer and to reduce the risks of contamination and we took this idea with enthusiasm.
We also plan to have a kill switch using an inducible promoter, such that the promoter will not function outside of our factory.

PlastiCure is a biological system designed to harbor 2 modules: degradation and synthesis. We imagined creating interchangeable versions of each module. This would enable us to degrade a different plastic and still synthesize Erythromycin A, or to degrade PET but synthesize a different molecule. Therefore, PlastiCure has been thought in a modular fashion so we can use the plastic degradation module of our system to produce a broad diversity of value added products, as an incentive to industry or cities to promote plastic waste transformation.