S181: Microbial Production of Plastics Independent of Petroleum

Many environmental bacteria are able to produce a family of intracellular polyesters named polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA) as cellular carbon and energy storage compound. Over the past many years, efforts have been made to commercially produce PHA in large scale. Due to the high cost of making PHA, their market competition is not strong compared with petrochemical plastics. However, rising oil cost has driven the global research to conduct investigations to lower the PHA production cost. The effects have slowly paid off. Now PHA has evolved into an industrial value chain ranging from industrial fermentation, bioplastics, biofuels, fine chemicals, bio-surfactants, medical implants and drug delivery. Metabolic engineering and synthetic biology approaches have been taken to improve the effectiveness of PHA microbial production as well as creating novel PHA polymers. Continuous processes have been developed for PHA industrial production. All the effects have led to the lowering of PHA production cost. Together with the emergence of PHA high value added application, PHA is now becoming not only a new bioplastic independent from petroleum but also a valuable products for many other applications.