Plastic isn’t bad. It’s the way the world processes or carelessly discards it that turns it into a villain.

If we look at what happens to plastic at the end of its life, numbers are discouraging. The world recycles only 10% of the plastic produced yearly, whilst 1% of it is made with renewable sources and 0.5% is biodegradable. The majority comes from petrol and is mostly discarded into landfills where it may take up to 500 years to decompose, potentially leaking pollutants into the soil and water.

As Renewi’s mission is to protect the world by giving new life to secondary raw materials, we saw a massive potential in making plastic from biomass, also called ‘bioplastic’. Thus, Renewi Organics began to develop, together with Paques Biomaterials, TU Delft and AMS, a process to create bioplastic from bacteria.

Yes, that’s right! The idea of this project is to cultivate a specific type of bacteria by feeding it organic waste and harvest part of it once it’s ready. The resulting material is a white powder that, once melted, can create a type of plastic named PHA (Polyhydroxyalkanoate).

Renewi Organics’ role in this consortium is to collect organic waste throughout the Netherlands, process it via anaerobic digestion and composting, and feed it to the bacteria. The innovation lies in the processing since the output waste must have many biodegradable components to be nutritious and ensure that the resulting bioplastic meets the customers’ needs.

Renewi’s Lelystad innovation centre is used to run pilots, as our biggest challenge so far is to ensure that the organic waste fed to the bacteria remains unaltered despite the changing input waste stream throughout the year. The project targets to be market-ready by 2025.