Team:UC Davis E/Company

From 2012e.igem.org

Team:UC Davis - 2012.igem.org




Company

A large problem facing society as a collective over the past few decades has been the advent of higher quantities of pollution, specifically plastic waste pollution. Although the world uses thousands of tons of plastic each day, only 6 percent of it is recycled. Not only is the disposal of plastics in our oceans, landfills, and environments detrimental to our ecosystem as a whole, but it also accentuates an incredibly inefficient waste of resources, as each pound of discarded plastic contains significant monetary value.

AmberCycle Industries, a technology leader for the chemical industry, aims to alleviate this problem. We deliver new, intuitive manufacturing processes that enable our partners to produce intermediate and amalgamate plastics from our renewable feedstocks. These chemicals serve as the basis for manufacturing sustainable products that make modern life possible, and our processes enable the production of the exact same intermediate and basic chemicals core of the chemical and material production industry. We expect our processes will deliver better economics with enhanced sustainability and a smaller environmental footprint than conventional petroleum-based manufacturing processes.

Our unique synthetic biology platform allows us to create fermentation-based manufacturing processes and to engineer efficient microorganisms that drive the conversion of discarded feedstocks into chemicals. We are developing a pipeline of manufacturing processes for the production of these chemicals, including our first target chemical, purified terephthalic acid, or PTA.