You’ve probably never given a lot of thought to what happens to wastewater, but it’s a major environmental issue. Municipal water treatment plants nationwide process more than 150 million gallons of wastewater every day. When the treated water is released into a river or ocean, it leaves behind more than four million tons of sludge, mostly burned or trucked away to landfills. That’s a lot of waste, and it’s expensive, costing as much as $200 million annually.
That’s where
Micromidas comes in. They’ve figured out how to convert sludge into a usable product. “Literally, we are brewing plastic,” said John Bissel, Micromidas CEO. “It’s very similar to brewing beer or anything else.” It’s been known for a while that a chemical in wastewater can be used to make plastic, but the challenge has always been extracting and converting it at a competitive price compared to the source of most of America’s plastic – oil.
The breakthrough lies in Micromidas’ proprietary process. The company takes sludge, renders it down to a liquid resembling chicken broth, and applies a cocktail of designer bacteria microbes. The chemical reactions that follow change the liquid’s composition into a thicker product, which is then run through an extruding machine, producing plastic.