Team:Virginia/Human Practices
Understanding Our Problem
McIntire Road Recycling Center
Objectives: To fully understand the issue of plastic waste, we need to understand the systems that manage it. We visited our community’s recycling center and spoke with the Director of Solid Waste, Mr. Phil McKalips.
What We Learned: Mr. McKalips explained to us that the recycling industry is inefficient and fragile. Recycling centers are ideally a place to collect products and separate them by material (cardboard, plastic, metal) for future use. However, the mixed material composition of many products and human error in material sorting complicates this process, resulting in impure recycling loads. These impurities disincentivize manufacturing companies from taking in recyclables over guaranteed clean virgin material. Consequently, many companies reject recycling loads which sends them directly to landfills.
“It makes me wonder if all of this [referring to the recycling center] just gives these materials a scenic route to a landfill” -Phil McKalips
In Summary:
- A pure product is crucial for competing in the material market.
- The financial hurdles that come with impurities made us realize that mechanical recycling alone cannot support a sustainable world. Chemical recycling, which can offer a pure product, is necessary to close the loops.
Expanded Polystyrene Task Force
Objectives: Sustainability lies at the core of our project. To learn more about Styrofoam waste reduction, we joined the University of Virginia’s EPS Taskforce, a committee of sustainability-minded thinkers dedicated to eradicating EPS in our university’s labs.
What We Learned: Being a part of the taskforce, we learned that our university has virtually no infrastructure for EPS recycling. The main culprit for this is EPS’ space-taking nature. Given that EPS is worth $0.20/lb, the standard 48 foot-long shipping truck would only be able to carry $200 worth of EPS at a time.1 Low cost and high volume make EPS not worth the transportation costs that are necessary in recycling. A potential solution is buying a densifyer which can reduce the volume of EPS. However, a densifyer costs $18,000 and takes up a 20 cubic feet of space.
Our partnership with the EPS taskforce inspired our first iGEM collaboration, for which we created a survey to quantify foam cooler use by research teams around the world.
In Summary:
- EPS’s voluminous and airy composition makes it unreasonable to transport and recycle.
- Several institutions are looking to invest in densifiers, which remove the air to enable cost-efficient shipping, but do not have the warehouse space to do so.
GreenBlue
Objectives: Green Blue is a local organization that works with businesses to promote sustainable material management. We met with the head of the organization and director of the cold packaging committee, Mr. Adam Gendell, to understand how businesses and industries perceive “sustainability.”
What We Learned: Mr. Gendell pointed out that in some ways polystyrene is more sustainable than other alternatives. Life cycle assessments have demonstrated that paper products and biodegradable plastics take up more energy and water to produce in comparison to that of EPS. In addition, these alternatives are less effective in their ability to insulate. While being a non-renewable plastic, EPS is the most energy-efficient, water-efficient, insulating packaging material. Adam emphasized that there is no “best” sustainable packaging. There are only trade-offs as efforts to boost one facet of sustainability often shift the burden to another.
In Summary:
- Sustainability is not only measured in a material’s ability to biodegrade. Other factors such as water and energy use for production are also factors of sustainability.
- In this sense, EPS can be considered a sustainable plastic because it takes less energy and water to make a more effective insulator.
- Because of its low production emissions, EPS is a needed material for a sustainable future. However, to minimize its dangerous impacts, we need to reduce the accumulation of styrofoam waste in the environment.
Agilyx
Objectives: While our biological device serves to convert styrene to PHBs, it is essential that we clearly understand the first step of converting polystyrene to styrene.
What We Learned: Agilyx is a commercial recycling company that transforms waste polystyrene into styrene through pyrolysis and is one of the first companies of its kind. John Desmarteau, the Director of Business Development, discussed the many advantages of this process, including the rate and purity with which it can be executed, and their collaboration with the Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ). He also stressed the importance of environmentally ethical business practices. As polystyrene recycling company, Agilyx works to promote sustainability. However, pyrolysis is a very energy intensive process which takes away from the sustainability component. To mitigate this issue, Agilyx captures and recycles heat from pyrolysis and sells their carbon byproduct (ash) to landfills to prevent methane from escaping into the atmosphere.
In Summary:
- There is more usable carbon in our landfills than in our reserves.
- Agilyx as a recycled styrene producer provides the infrastructure necessary to industrialize our device.
- With heat recapture and repurposed carbon byproduct, pyrolysis can be a more sustainable chemical recycling procedure.
Danimer Scientific
Objectives: Danimer Scientific is a commercial company that produces PHAs, a biodegradable plastic alternative. We spoke with Mr. Richard Ivey, the Marketing Manager at Danimer Scientific, to learn more about producing and marketing sustainable plastics.
What We Learned: The goal of Danimer is to replace petroleum-based plastics, such as PP and PET, with their novel technologies. He explained how the PHAs they produce can be combined with different biopolymers to mimic the properties of common consumer goods that are normally made of petrochemicals.
In Summary:
- PHAs have properties comparable to petroleum-based plastics, such as insulating ability, high tensile strength, and food-contact compatibility.
- Thus, PHAs have the potential to replace petroleum-based plastics for a wide range of items, from shipping materials to food packaging to medical implements.
Designing our Device
After diving into our two problems, we reached out to experts who have been working on these issues for years to inform the design of our research. Talking to experts gave us important insight on what to look out for and how to solve problems.
Dr. Keith Kozminski
- Dr. Keith Kozminski is an Associate Professor of Biology and Cell Biology at the University of Virginia. He studies growth mechanisms of yeast, is the director of SynBio @ UVA and, perhaps most importantly, is our PI.
- Dr. Kozminski has dedicated much of his time to training our team to navigate synthetic biology and to be thorough, responsible researchers.
- Dr. Kozminski mentored the team through problem and project development, and was a readily available resource to troubleshoot all of our wet lab issues. He was integral to the execution of our experiments by providing us with advice and mentorship on many protocols.
Dr. Jason Papin
- Dr. Jason Papin is a Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Virginia, and our team’s other PI. His research centers around biomedical data sciences, computational systems biology, quantitative biosciences, biotechnology, and bioengineering.
- Dr. Papin was an essential resource for our modeling team. Because his research frequently deals with genome-scale metabolic models, Dr. Papin provided essential guidance for how to interpret and analyze the results of our model.
Dr. George McArthur
- Dr. George McArthur is the Director of Genetic Design-Build at Arzeda, a protein design company, and the founder of the Virginia iGEM team.
- With his years of experience in biotechnology, Dr. McArthur mentored our wetlab team through using Teselegen and ApE and gave us crucial feedback on our plasmid design and promoter choice. Dr. McArthur guided us to resources that were crucial to the design and implementation of our project.
- Dr. McArthur also guided us to search for optimized ribosomal binding sites, by helping us discover that RBS of our desired genes would lead to inefficient translation of our expressed genes.
Dr. Richard Gross
- Dr. Richard Gross is a Professor of Chemistry at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. In his work, he studies PHA producing genes.
- As an expert of PHA genes, Dr. Gross aided us in designing and optimizing our pha plasmid to be easily transformed but also proficient in PHA production.
Dr. Brent Gunnoe
- Dr. Brent Gunnoe is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Virginia.
- Under his guidance, Dr. Gunnoe aided us in designing a styrene integration system to feed styrene to our bacteria.
Dr. Justin Barone
- Dr. Justin Barone is a Professor of Biological Systems Engineering at Virginia Polytechnic Institute.
- Dr. Barone helped us focus our project to compare the cost of PHA production to the process of disposing styrene waste.
Tom Moutinho
- Mr. Moutinho is a 4th year graduate student working at the University of Virginia’s Computational Systems Biology Laboratory. He studies Lactobacillus metabolism in the context of the gastrointestinal microbiome.
- As an experienced model builder, Mr. Moutinho helped us understand, construct, analyze, and verify our flux-balance-analysis and metabolic network model.
Our Impact
Our device disrupts the plastic production to waste chain in three ways: 1) producing a biodegradable plastic alternative, PHBs, 2) reducing the demand for petroleum-based plastics, PET and PP, and 3) incentivizing polystyrene recycling. These three impacts divert materials in a way that prioritizes the environment and works toward building a responsible, sustainable world.
