Prof Stephen Wallace’s team at the University of Edinburgh has engineered E. coli bacteria to turn a type of plastic used widely in food and drink packaging – polyethylene terephthalate, or PET – into L-DOPA, a drug used in the treatment of the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.
The process involves first breaking down PET waste – some 50 million tonnes of which are produced annually – into chemical building blocks of terephthalic acid.
Using the new technique to produce L-DOPA is more sustainable than traditional methods of making pharmaceuticals, which rely on the use of finite fossil fuels, the team says.
There is an urgent need for new methods to recycle PET, a strong, lightweight plastic derived from non-renewable materials such as oil and gas. Existing recycling processes are not completely efficient and still contribute to plastic pollution worldwide.
Read the research in Nature Sustainability here