Petroleum-based plastics have been invented for over 100 years so far, but their solution cycle is as long as 300-500 years. The traditional plastics cause serious white pollution problems and bring a huge burden to the global environment.
Biomaterials, PHA (Polyhydroxyalkanoates), have similar materials and properties to traditional petrochemical plastics and can play an important role in more than 50% of petroleum-based plastics applications. They can be used to make plastic bags, plastic tableware, plastic bottles and many more.
More importantly, bioplastics degrade quickly and degrade in soil within 3-6 months, while other microbes can breed faster and eat more fertile after they have eaten this bioplastic.
However, the world's two most common petroleum-based plastics, polyethylene and polypropylene, have an annual production capacity of 130-140 million tons and PHA has an annual capacity of only about 50,000 tons, producing only a fraction of petroleum-based plastics.
The key reason is the cost of plastic too cheap, the production process is too mature, the amount is too large.According to the analysis, according to the current production of bioplastics (PHA) prices, about ordinary polyethylene and polypropylene 3 to 10 times.
Therefore, in order to popularize the bioplastics, the cost must be reduced, that is, how to make some microbes fat-fed at a low cost.
Professor Chen Guoqiang, a professor at the School of Life Sciences at Tsinghua University and a Cheung Kong Scholar, led a young team to find suitable strains of well-being and reconstruct the PHA production process with the emerging 'synthetic biology' technology to realize the total cost of production Lower than the existing technology in half, walk in the forefront of the world.
Tsinghua University, Professor Chen Guoqiang biodegradable plastic R & D team
At present, they have successfully completed the pilot phase of an eight-month bio-plastics pilot of new technology industrialization and will start mass production of 5-10 million tons by 2018.
At present, PHA pellets have been applied to biodegradable plastic sheeting, disposable wood flour blending and pure PHA tableware, color 3D printing silk, electrospun fibers, shopping bags and other end products:
The accumulation of PHA in C. rosales can account for more than 80% of the cell dry weight (cell weight after removal of water)
PHA has also been found to have good medical value. It has good biocompatibility. P4HB in PHA has been approved as a surgical suture in the United States and has been clinically favored for the development of cartilage repair materials, nerve guides , Artificial esophagus and so on.