Ocean-grown bioplastics

Uluu co-founder Julia Reisser, who studied plastic pollution and was looking for an alternative to fossil fuel plastics, knew that a PHA polymer could be created by microbial fermentation. What to feed these microbes was the next critical step: bioplastics had so far been created by feeding the microbes land crops or waste produce. Instead, the oceanographer identified sugar-rich seaweed, which absorbs carbon dioxide, as the optimum food source. “Seaweed is scalable, affordable and carbon negative. [You can] transform [it] into PHAs, which can replace most, if not all, plastics while remaining biocompatible with [the] environment,” says Reisser.

Uluu scientists extract the PHAs from the fermenters by bursting the saline-loving microbes with fresh water. Once the PHA is turned into pellets, these can be shaped into films, rigid plastic or fibers to replace nylon. These bioplastics can break down in four weeks, even with home composting.