POOP PLASTIC PUTS WASTE TO WORK
It’s ultimate dream: Take human waste and turn it into one of the most ubiquitous materials around, plastic. The Sacramento-based startup Micromidas has the technology to do it. And no, their polymer doesn’t stink.
When Micromidas CEO John Bissell and his colleagues were undergrads at UC Davis, they recognized that plastic and sludge from wastewater treatment facilities were two very large problems. After graduating in 2008, they started their company to develop technology that could offer a solution.
Usually wastewater treatment facilities separate the liquids from the solids in a large settling tank, Bissell told me. He and his colleagues presented their innovation at the PopTech conference currently underway in Camden, Maine. The heaviest nastiness at the bottom is incinerated or sent to a landfill or used to grown non-edible crops that are tilled. Not great options. Micromidas can take that sludge and turn 50 to 70 percent of it into plastic by feeding it to their own special microbes.