Turn­ing indus­tri­al waste into med­ic­al-grade plastic

School of Engin­eer­ing and Inform­a­tion Tech­no­logy research­ers Dr Dami­an Laird and Dr Leonie Hughes have been invest­ig­at­ing an envir­on­ment­ally friendly solu­tion for the use of oxal­ate, one of the major waste products of the alu­mina industry. ​“We are inter­ested in find­ing a use for car­bon-based indus­tri­al waste, which is cur­rently stock­piled or is dif­fi­cult to treat,” Dr Laird said. ​“By upcyc­ling the car­bon from a waste stream we are able to avoid the pro­duc­tion of car­bon diox­ide whilst cre­at­ing some­thing use­ful.” After sourcing an ini­tial bac­teri­al cul­ture from a loc­al wastewa­ter treat­ment plant, the team cre­ated a syn­thet­ic wastewa­ter to under­stand the con­di­tions required for bac­teria to con­vert the oxal­ate waste product into the bio­de­grad­able plastic. The research team is now identi­fy­ing the suite of bac­teria that can work in the pro­cess and examin­ing ways to increase the amount of oxal­ate that is con­ver­ted. ​“We are tak­ing inspir­a­tion from the pro­duc­tion of bioplastic from food waste and apply­ing it to a tox­ic by-product of the alu­mina industry,” Dr Hughes said. ​“This will be a nat­ur­ally pro­duced plastic that is biocom­pat­ible and com­pletely bio­de­grad­able, and one of our goals is to 3D print products for the med­ic­al industry such as stents and sutures.” The team is also col­lab­or­at­ing with Mur­doch University’s Algae Research and Devel­op­ment Centre to look at using cyanobac­teria (blue-green algae), organ­isms that have a blend of bac­teria and algae, to find a way to accel­er­ate the pro­cess. ​“Even­tu­ally we envi­sion this bioplastic pro­duc­tion form­ing part of an integ­rated biore­finery at Mur­doch Uni­ver­sity,” Dr Hughes said. This research was recently pub­lished in the Journ­al of Envir­on­ment­al Chem­ic­al Engin­eer­ing and can be read here. Source: Mur­doch University