Michigan Tech lab works to turn plastic waste into food | Crain's Detroit Business

Stephen Techtmann, a microbiologist at Michigan Technological University in Houghton, and his research team have come up with an extremely tiny partial solution to a massive problem.

The tiny part? Microbes found in soil.

The massive part? How in the world to get rid of at least some of the plastics that have become ubiquitous in the environment, including the Great Lakes, and how to deal with traditional plastic waste, as well.

His team’s solution? Have the tiny microbes get fat by eating plastic waste, then kill the microbes and turn them into a carbohydrate- and protein-rich powder that smells like nutritional yeast and can be a food source.

The project to eat tiny microbes carries a non-tiny title — Biological Plastic Reuse by Olefin and Ester Transforming Engineered Isolates and Natural Consortia, or BioPROTEIN for short.

“It felt a lot more like science fiction than really something that would work,” said Techtmann, an associate professor of biological sciences at the school and associate director of Michigan Tech’s prestigious Great Lakes Research Center.

But it works. It is science supported by $8 million over three rounds of funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency as the team hit required milestones.

Techtmann said they haven’t received or sought any equity investing, yet, “but it’s something we’ll look at at some point. The Innovation and Commercialization Office at Tech will help with that.”

In 2019, DARPA, which funds early-stage, high-risk, high-reward projects to discover viable ways to solve big military problems, issued a call for research to find ways to deal with the copious amount of plastic waste generated when troops are sent into the field or by the production of military gear and weaponry.

Much of it is now burned in hazardous burn pits, a health threat to military personnel and civilians either working for the military or living nearby.

It’s far more than just a military problem, of course. According to the United Nations Environment Program, the world creates about  440 million tons of plastic waste a year, most of it for single-use items like water bottles, and much of it ends up in landfills, rivers, lakes and oceans.

Research into edible microorganisms dates back at least 60 years, but the body of evidence is small and published research rare.

But with DARPA funding available, Techtmann decided to take up the challenge and his proposal was accepted for phase one of funding in the fall of 2020.

As is the process with DARPA grants, once viability is shown, researchers turn to other sources of federal funding to advance the research and scale up.

Techtmann said he is seeking funding from the U.S. Army, the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation and is optimistic that substantial funding will come, based on the success of the DARPA-funded research, early next year to help ramp up small lab-scale production into much larger, commercial-scale production.

Techtmann initially thought he would need to go to a highly contaminated environment to find bacteria capable of breaking down plastic, bacteria with the Latin names of rhodococcus, paracoccus and pseudomonas.

But some research had shown that bacteria from compost piles can work, too, likely because plastic has a similar molecular structure to some plant compounds bacteria find tasty.

Techtmann said a friend of his has a sheep farm just north of Hancock, Houghton’s sister city on the Portage Canal, and has a compost pile for his garden, which turned out to be teeming with the microbes he needed.

“We felt very lucky to get the microbes we needed. Later, one of my grad students took some students out to other compost piles and found the right microbes at those, too. Apparently there’s something about compost piles that is an interesting environment for these microbes to grow in.”

The Tech system starts with a mechanical shredder for turning plastic into small bits, and then they go into a reactor, soaking in ammonium hydroxide under high heat.

Some plastics, like that in water bottles, break down at this point. Others, like in food packaging, go into another reactor where they are subject to much higher heat before becoming liquified. The liquid is moved to another reactor, where it is consumed by the huge colony of microbes.

“Our goal is to go from disbelief, like, ‘You’re kidding me. You want to do what?’ to ‘You know, that might be actually feasible,’” Leonard Tender, a program manager at DARPA who oversaw the plastic waste projects, said in a news account shortly after the program was launched.

While DARPA solicited grants that could turn plastic into human food and Techtmann’s team can do that, he said they have no intention of creating anything but food for animals.

For one thing, “using it as food for humans has an ick factor,” Techtmann said, one that might be impossible to overcome. "It has nothing to do with the safety of food but the perception. People are like ‘I don't want to eat plastic.’ "

For another, Techtmann thinks he can get federal approval to sell microbe powder to feed animals in a year or two. Getting approval to sell it to humans would take much longer and much more money.

Techtmann said preliminary toxicity tests show the microbe powder is safe. He said his team generally has 10-12 people, including grad students, undergrads, other professors at Tech and even some at other schools.

Joshua Pearce is an electrical engineer at Western University in Ontario who as part of Techtmann’s research team did the initial toxicology screening, comparing the microbe powder to known toxins, with clean results. He also fed the microbes to roundworms without apparent ill effects, and subsequent tests of rodents went well, too.

Techtmann said they have written a draft of the results to be published in a scientific journal, and after publication, results will be submitted late this year or early next to the U.S Food and Drug Administration for review and, he hopes, its GRAS designation, an acronym for “generally recognized as safe.” That designation would make it easier to get funding from potential investors in a spin-off company and get approval from the FDA to sell microbe power to animal food manufacturers.

The lab has a track record of successful research and spinoff companies.

Ting Lu, a professor in bio engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is also on the Tech team.

Subsequent to the start of DARPA funding, in 2021, Techtmann and Lu won the 1 million Euro Future Insight Prize from Merck KGaA of Darmstadt, Germany, equal to about $1.1 million.

Another member of the team was David Shonnard, a research professor in chemical engineering with the title of the Robbins Chair in Sustainable Use of Materials. His focus was on how to use microbes to convert plastics into fuel.

In April, the Michigan Tech Enterprise Zone, one of 21 Smart Zones in the state supported by the Michigan Economic Development Corp., announced Shonnard’s work had been spun off into a private company, Resurgent Innovations Inc., and joined a startup boot camp at the Smart Zone’s incubator.

In July, Resurgent and the other four Tech spinoffs in the camp pitched at a demo day that MTEC hosted at Newlab at Michigan Central in Detroit.

Techtmann first got interested in bacteria as solutions for problems after the Deepwater Horizon disaster spewed 210 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, a year after he got his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland.

“I wanted to see what nature has developed and how to use it to combat industrial waste,” he said.

He studied whether and how much oil-eating bacteria could clean up fouled water and determined that bacteria can be used as a biomarker to assess an ecosystem’s health. That got him introduced to the folks at DARPA, who were trying to figure out how to track where ships at sea had gone without relying on tracking technology.

Techtmann proposed using bacteria, and as a result of his work, in 2016, a year after he joined Michigan Tech, DARPA awarded him its Young Faculty Award, something meant to link young researchers to potential future government funders.

The future for Techtmann arrived in 2020.

While his focus is on feeding microbes to animals, a few companies are known to be in various stages of commercializing edible microbes for humans.

Solar Foods, a Finnish startup, has created a powder that has been approved for use in Singapore, and the company has applied for approval in the United Kingdom and the European Union.