Join us for one of AIChE’s most prominent awards and lectures to celebrate our 2025 Langer Fellow, Mark Blenner, Thomas & Kipp Gutshall Career Development Associate Professor of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, University of Delaware. The event will include a presentation from Dr. Blenner, titled "Biotechnology Innovations for Plastic Waste Recovery, Deconstruction, and Upcycling".
The Langer Fellow will be awarded an unrestricted grant up to $100,000, enabling them to tackle their bold and creative ideas into technical and commercial innovations with broad societal impact.
Biotechnology Innovations for Plastic Waste Recovery, Deconstruction, and Upcycling
Mark Blenner, Thomas & Kipp Gutshall Career Development Associate Professor of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, University of Delaware
Plastic waste is an existential global issue, with nearly 400 million tons produced annually and about 200 million tons discarded, much of it polluting ecosystems. Even if plastic production ceased today, waste would continue accumulating for decades. Plastic manufacturing contributes 3-5% of global CO₂ emissions. A circular plastic economy—focused on recycling and upcycling—is vital for environmental and human health. Microplastics and nanoplastics, an especially concerning waste fraction, enter the environment at an estimated 1.3 million tons per year, originating mainly from tires, synthetic fibers, and industrial plastics. Microplastics are found from the most remote locations (e.g., Antarctica), ubiquitously throughout our food systems, and even in human brains. Microplastics become too diluted for economic recovery once they disperse into ecosystems and need to be addressed at major entry points.
Problems like plastic waste are societal problems, but ownership and responsibility are largely diluted. Solutions cannot wait for regulation to catch up; therefore, innovations must deliver significant value to early adopters and have the potential to scale to larger markets. The need for coupling recovery, degradation, and upcycling together presents a difficult challenge for product and process development business strategy. Biotechnology, including microbes and enzymes, can efficiently process mixed, uncleaned plastic waste and be deployed in decentralized systems making them attractive for plastic upcycling. Synthetic biology can enhance these solutions for industrial applications.
In this talk, I will present our teams technologies on recovery, degradation, and upcycling of plastic waste. We have confirmed that biological processes can deconstruct polyethylene, determined that mealworm gut microbes are necessary for this process, identified the first enzymes in the pathway, and have engineered improved variants of these enzymes. We also found a microplastic recovery capability from the mealworm gut that may play an important role in creating enzyme-plastic interactions necessary for deconstruction.