Poliloop: A Bacterial Cocktail

Plastic is an integral part of our life. It includes household applications to heavy industrial applications.

Subrahmanian K

Poliloop Logo | credits: Poliloop

Plastic is an integral part of our life. It includes household applications to heavy industrial applications. However the comfort of using plastic come at a cost; its wastes. The current situation is so worse that within a few years the mass of plastic waste in oceans will be more than that of the aquatic life in the oceans. Recently scientists have detected the presence of micro-plastic in carrots and apples. The main cause of plastic waste is tone time use plastics, which to an extend can be avoided by following simple steps and using certain alternatives to fulfil the needs. To make those alternatives to mainstream markets it will take a of couple years. With humans creating more than 300 million tons of plastic waste annually and less than 40% recycling the amount of plastic wastes is almost unmanageable amounts.

That's when the importance of poliloop comes. While they strongly support recycling, it is quite clear that it is not enough to deal with the current scale of plastic pollution. Their aim is to provide an eco-friendly and an evolving response to the crisis. They aim to offer an industrially relevant solution to deal with non-recyclable plastics by mimicking nature, using the once polluting plastic waste as a carbon rich food source for bacteria, which in turn create valuable end-product for us to use and in-cooperate into a global circular ecosystem.

How they do it!

They created a bacterial cocktail that together consumes plastic packaging waste. Carbon plastics can be used as a single source of carbon, integrating them into their metabolites. The process is similar to the way organic waste is consumed in composting piles, but the raw materials here are fossil based. Their bacteria have succeeded in transforming what was once a fossil-based product (plastic packaging) into what it originally was, millions of years ago, part of the Earth's natural ecosystem.

Their degradation process completely eliminates plastic

Degradation process completely eliminating plastic | credits: Poliloop

The initiative is undertaken by a team of 4

• Liz Madaras, Co-founder & CEO, Bioengineer

• Krisztina Lévay, PhD Co-founder & CTO, Chemical Engineer

• Gábor Antal, Co-founder & COO, Transportation Engineer

• Colin Helm, VP of Sales, Advertisement and Business

According the co-founders of the company everything looks so good and satisfying. However there are certain things that we need to consider on the situation of recycling plastic.

Even now they have not given enough information on actual process nor there are any discussions made. The poliloop will degrade the plastic, however the state of the degraded product is still unclear. When it comes to recycling even though there are a number of processes, to make poliloop a popular choice it should be economically feasible which is possible only by making it available for mass production which hasn't begun. Being a new method it will take a long time to get approval from different authorities across the globe.

As enthusiasts let’s hope that the process become faster and poliloop will provide solution to the global problem.