Announcement: Guest Lecture in September!

Plastics are essential materials in our lives, but they show a problem: they are difficult to degrade. As a consequence, a very large fraction of the plastic waste is stored in landfills or released into the environment. In recent years we have witnessed an outstanding advancement in the enzymatic degradation of common plastics such as polyethylene (PET) or polyurethane (PU), which can be recycled intro the same polymers and also up-cycled into other molecules and materials of added value in an environmentally friendly process. MIPLACE is dedicated to develop strategies to turn plastic waste into a feedstock for engineered microbial communities with the final goal of producing bio-PU. In this presentation, Dr José Jiménez will showcase the progress in PET and PU biodegradation as well as in the valorisation of the resulting monomers by natural and engineered microorganisms.