Fighting climate change
Fighting climate change on a new front
During the 20th century, the advent of modern chemistry and the growth of the petrochemical industry resulted in the development of new materials—plastics and polymers—that frequently surpassed older, renewable materials in both cost and performance. Today, around 380 million metric tons of plastic are produced every year.
Unfortunately, the progress in manufacturing and the development of plastics produced using fossil fuels is contributing to climate change. According to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the plastic industry emits greenhouse gases at every stage of life—from materials extraction to incineration. They cite a 2019 report from the Center for International Environmental Law that projects the industry will release up to 1.34 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions every year by 2030, equal to the total emissions from all of Africa.
Plastics developed with polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA)—a renewable resource—can help address the challenge of both plastic pollution and climate change. The tools of modern biotechnology now make it possible to precisely incorporate nature's catalysts—enzymes—into microbial and plant bio-factories, to produce a broad, versatile family of PHAs. PHAs are based on the use of sustainable raw materials, ultimately carbon dioxide and water, transformed by the sun's energy through photosynthesis.
The discovery that certain soil microbes evolved with the ability to store energy in the form of PHAs, which accumulate as discrete, inert granules inside the cells, showed that nature had provided the means to produce potentially useful plastics. Research groups throughout the world have demonstrated the ability of microbes to use an enormous number of different building blocks to produce novel PHA structures. Using other building blocks (i.e., monomers), the properties of PHAs can be varied from hard and stiff materials to very elastic ones. The structural diversity within the PHA family allows the engineering of PHA compositions—sustainably produced—that will be cost-effective, versatile alternatives to over half the synthetic polymers in use today.
PHA is certified biodegradable under industrial compost, soil (ambient) and marine environments. It is derived from nature and returns to nature when it reaches its end of life.