Grant: Alliance Grants

The world faces swiftly growing, intertwined challenges arising from linear resource consumption, climate change, and accumulating anthropogenic waste. Plastic and biogenic wastes, and planet-warming C1 gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) all continue to accumulate in the environment as human consumption relentlessly increases. Though this reflects steadily increasing quality of life globally, it is clear that this pace of human development is not currently sustainable. The Center for Innovative Recycling and Circular Economy (CIRCLE) will address the challenges of these recalcitrant waste streams by leveraging biological activities from across the tree of life which we have identified, characterized, engineered, and imagined. This will help to solve the dual global challenges of accumulating waste and rising demand for chemicals and materials by transforming the former into the latter via novel valorization processes. These processes will close the loop to support a circular economy. The CIRCLE team will work to alleviate the specific challenges associated with valorizing plastic and biogenic wastes, and C1 gases through integration of biological discovery and development work with traditional chemical process design. We will achieve this through international, transdisciplinary collaboration which will enable recycling/upcycling process development and intensification. Our activities will integrate fundamental discovery, traditional characterization and engineering approaches for novel microbial hosts and microbiota, and the development of new such approaches with large-scale process development. We will contextualize these activities using techno-economic analysis (TEA), life cycle assessment (LCA), and risk assessment to ensure scaling feasibility and thereby maximize translational impact.