Grant: Alliance Grants

Plastic waste has reached epidemic proportions worldwide. In Canada, approximately 90 per cent of the plastic ends up in landfills or the environment, including the lakes and oceans. The increasing accumulation of plastic waste in the environment has had numerous detrimental impacts on the ecosystem. Moreover, the detrimental effects of microplastics in aquatic environments and their toxicological implications for the Canadian fishing industry in terms of human health and financial loss have been well documented. Recent literature suggests that certain microbes are capable of biodegrading plastic constituents. However, microbial plastic biodegradation is still quite slow, and not sustainable for industrial-scale bioremediation usage. Therefore, the overall goal of this partnership is to bioengineer microbial strains capable of robust plastic bioremediation as a novel solution for the management of plastic waste. In particular, this partnership aims to utilize modern molecular tools to characterize the molecular pathways underlying the natural ability of microbes to degrade and decontaminate plastic constituents. In this study, methods to augment these naturally-occurring plastic degradation molecular pathways will be assessed to develop microbial-based solutions for plastic waste management. Therefore, the goals of this specific NSERC Alliance grant is to develop two novel microbial-based solutions for plastic waste management: (1) a custom-tailored nutrient supplementation to selectively promote microbial plastic metabolism, and (2) the genetic engineering of microbial strains with superior plastic degradation characteristics. This study will lay the foundation for biotechnological processes that will provide a clean, cost-effective, and sustainable bioremediation strategy to combat environmental plastic waste pollution.