Team:Pasteur Paris/Description

Plasticure

The Problem :

Every year, more and more plastics are produced. In 2000, 190 million tons of plastic were produced in the world, whereas today, approximatively 300 million tons of plastic are produced.

For more details, click here

However, today, the treatment of plastic waste is not adapted to this exponential production… In 2012, 25.2 million tons of plastic waste were produced in Europe, among which only 26 % were recycled, while 36 % were burned in order to produce energy and the remaining 38 % were dumped or buried. At the end, this plastic is accumulated in nature, and especially in the oceans.

Source : http://www.planetoscope.com/petrole/989-production-mondiale-de-plastique.html

For more details, click here

In our oceans, more than 90% of the plastic particles are smaller than 5 mm, which makes it almost impossible to clean the oceans and they are small enough to enter our food chain.

Our solution :

PlastiCure is a biological system based on E.coli designed to degrade plastics and use the degradation products to produce Biologically active compounds. The challenge of the project is to make this two pathways work simultaneously.

By engineering the metabolism of E .coli we want to create a system able to produce a curative product and in the same time help address the issue of plastic pollution.

The idea here is first to create a new way to treat plastic waste but also to produce from plastic a profitable transformation product that will increase efforts in plastic recycling.