Better Breakdown: The Digest’s 2019 Multi-Slide Guide to PET Upcycling

As frustrated as you may get with your pet sometimes, we aren’t talking about upcycling dogs and cats here, but PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic that is typically landfilled. One group at NREL and ORNL are working on developing cost-effective biological methods to better breakdown and upcycle PET.

At the recent DOE BETO 2019 Project Peer Review, Gregg Beckham and Adam Guss from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, gave this presentation on using wholly biological methods to convert PET to exemplary product (e.g., ß-ketoadipate) via Consolidated Bioprocessing-like strategy and hybrid biological-catalytic methods to the same product via catalyzed glycolysis and microbial conversion of glycolysis product, and more