Engineered bacteria turns landfill waste into bio-plastic

A team of students from Imperial College London have engineered harmless bacteria to turn landfill waste into a biodegradable plastic or bio-plastic. The team says the bio-plastic could be used in healthcare to make syringes and other disposable devices used in hospitals.

They have also developed a method for breaking down the bio-plastic so that it can be easily disposed of when it is no longer needed.

The students won a gold medal at the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition, coming first in the manufacturing section and third overall out of total of 200 teams worldwide.

The Imperial team re-engineered the genetic code of harmless E.coli bacteria so that they can break down landfill waste and turn it into bio-plastic. Current methods for making bio-plastics rely on plants as the main ingredient, but this means valuable agricultural land has to be used to grow the plants.

The team says its process could be scaled up to industrial levels and that using waste material instead of plants could free up agricultural land so that it can be used more productively for agriculture.

Imperial team member Jemma Pilcher says, ''In the future, our system could provide a sustainable way to make an environmentally-friendly alternative to petroleum-based plastics, which would reduce our dependency on oil.  Additionally, this system would divert rubbish away from landfill sites and incinerators, which have very negative effects on the environment by releasing toxins, and instead use it as a resource.''

"Technologies such as ours could one day be used to deal with the global challenge of how to dispose of ever increasing levels of waste,'' added team member Margaria Kopniczky. ''Perhaps in the future we will have household appliances that contain engineered bacteria that turn domestic waste into new 3D printed bioplastic objects such as a plastic container to store the leftovers from a meal.''

The team consists of Jemma Pilcher, third year undergraduate in Biochemistry; Margarita Kopniczky, third year undergraduate in Biology; Iain Bower fourth year Biology with Management; Wenqiang Chi, fourth year undergraduate in Biomedical engineering; James Strutt, MSc in Stem Cells; Matthew Chin MSc in Biomedical Engineering and Sisi Fan, MSc in Bioinformatics.