Plastics are widely used in the global economy. The packaging, building, and automotive industry represent the largest application fields for plastics but also in the electronic, household, and agriculture segments, plastic-based products are indispensable. At the beginning of the 1970s, researchers started to understand how to engineer DNA rationally and bring this synthetic DNA alive in microbes. A new area, the area of gene technology, was born. The actual beneficial attributes of plastics for application purposes led to major challenges in their disposal. The ability to produce plastic monomers can be a natural property of microorganisms, or they can be “trained” to produce monomers of interest. The chapter discusses Bio-based plastics as a replacement for fossil-based plastics. Lactic acid is not only a natural product in humans and microorganisms but also produced industrially. Microorganisms produce a broad spectrum of sugar polymers, which play a role in various physiological processes.
Click here to get access to the full article.