There is an urgent need for sustainable alternatives to current plastics products that has become a devastating environmental problem. MARPLAST aims at developing bacterial strains for sustainable industrial production of polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs), the fully biodegradable polymer known as bioplastics.
Based on a large in-house bacteria culture collection,
MARPLAST will develop efficient PHA-producing marine bacteria that can be cultivated on different abundant and cheap biomass as carbon source. The ultimate goal is to provide bacterial strains suitable for industrial scale bioplastics production.