Sewage to Plastic

Have you ever wondered what happens to your organic waste after you flush the toilet? Many people don’t. Did you ever think there was a downstream use for the stuff? How about turning it into biodegradable plastic? I know this seems far-fetched, but not according to a California based company called Micromidas who is doing just that. Micromidas is a new company that locates waste-water treatment plants, sets up a facility on site, takes the organic load and then converts it into plastic in-house.

Whenever I go scouting for new innovation, I say to myself “(a) is this a new product? and can it (b) reduce the impact an existing problem?” If the answer is yes to both, then I know there is a future for this product and my attention is immediately captured. Micromidas has created plastic from sewage that can potentially solve two problems: (a) sewage sludge  and (b) petroleum plastic waste. 

Indeed, the collection and disposable of sewage is very costly, time consuming and damaging to environment. As the cities of the world are expanding, a lot of waste-water facilities are becoming overloaded.  The solids in these facilities are very difficult and costly to remove as you can’t burn them, throw them in the ocean, or dig a whole and stick them in there. 

A lot of the money spent in sewage water disposable involves drying it out, putting it in trucks and just driving until they find an area to dump it. However, when it is dumped it dries out into methane and carbon dioxide... two greenhouse gasses destroying the ozone layer! After it’s all done the trucks go back and get more. It’s a cycle that never ends and involves a lot of manual labor.

Petroleum based plastic is a very involved process when you look at the entire life-cycle. First off, you have to drill down into the earth, pump it up, send it to a refinery, refine it, pull out fractions, send it to a chemical manufacturer who polymerizes it to get a final resin that is sent to a manufacturer....this process goes on forever. Is this very involved process worth making plastic from petroleum that will be used for 5 min and then throw away? In fact, plastic requires 8% of all the world’s oil and, 150 million tons of plastic is “thrown away” every year.  As a result there are literally these huge islands of plastic floating around in the oceans, some of them larger than the state of Texas.

What most people don’t realize is that sewage contains proteins, amino acids, carboyhydrates, simple sugars, fatty acids and fats. Micromidas feeds this sewage to their genetically modified bacteria cocktails. The reason they have a cocktail of bacteria is because no species will preferentially eat all of those ingredients. As a result, the bacteria produce/store a bio-polyester called polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA) –type of plastic, similar in texture, feel, and properties to the plastic we have been using all of our lives. The only difference of PHA plastic is that enzymes can break it down. 

I always say, that it should not be about what a company is doing, but rather HOW they are doing it. This is exactly the case for Micromidas as it is their process in making biodegradable plastic that I find fascinating and so novel!

Society is using a model to reduce waste that is not working. By that, I mean we as consumers are under the impression that by just using less all of these problems will go away (i.e. cloth grocery bags instead of a plastic grocery bag; tin water bottle versus. plastic water bottle; obsessively shutting the lights off every time we leave the house). Yes, this may buy us some time but it is essentially a false solution and we have to recognize this. What we need to do is find better solutions, and Micromidas has proved that they have.

Learn more by watching this video where John Bissell, the CEO of Micromidas talks about his company...