Militant recycling: US Department of Defense partners with Conagen on fermentation tech

14 Dec 2021 --- The US Department of Defense’s (DOD) ReSource program is partnering with US-based biotech company Conagen to use its proprietary fermentation technology for converting plastic waste into reusable materials on the battlefield.

Under the DOD, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Biological Technologies Office created the ReSource Program to research and develop an integrated self-containment system for the country’s waste.

The project explores various combinations of synthetic biology and chemical technology for turning plastic waste into critical supplies for US markets. The DOD’s new partnership with Conagen will see a fermentation process turn plastics and other forms of common waste into purified usable products such as oils, lubricants and edible macronutrients.

“Humanity needs to make better use of plastic resources and close the recycling loop,” says Dr. Casey Lippmeier, vice president of innovation at Conagen. “This cooperative agreement project will demonstrate the value of recycled material for building a sustainable infrastructure.”

Circularizing battlefield supplies
Launched this year, DARPA’s ReSource program aims to “revolutionize” how the US military procures critical warfare supplies by engineering self-contained, integrated systems rapidly producing large quantities of supplies from feedstock. US military food packaging currently costs more than the military’s food itself.

Performer teams are tasked with developing systems to break down mixed waste, including common plastics, and reformulate the waste at the molecular level into strategic materials and chemicals.

The military’s food packaging supplies currently cost the country more energy than the food itself – something the program leaders say can be fixed through proper research.

“There is more energy in the packaging of an MRE (meal, ready-to-eat) than in the MRE itself,” says Dr. Blake Bextine, ReSource program manager. “Through ReSource, we are using science to solve the DOD’s plastic waste dilemma while supporting Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief stabilization operations in resource-limited environments.”

Novoloop and MIT
The DAPRA ReSource program is run at the US Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in collaboration with Conagen and US research group Novoloop.

Research is being conducted at MIT’s Voigt lab, which specializes in microbial genetic design and engineering and has already created tools and platform technologies central to the program’s efforts.

“While conventional fermentation has been used for centuries to make foods and beverages, precision fermentation has become the core resource for commercializing natural and sustainable synthetic biology products,” says Lippmeier.

“Recycling plastic waste is just the beginning,” he continues. “This DARPA-funded project primarily seeks to improve the efficient use of resources by our troops.”

“However, the technology for converting plastics and bioplastics into other higher-value materials should create incentives to remove these pollutants from the environment and support humanitarian efforts with renewable sources of food, nutrition and water.”

Fermentation tech
The DOD’s employment of fermentation technology for recycling waste joins a growing body of industry R&D looking to use similar processes to produce recycled plastics.

Last year, LanzaTech partnered with L’Oréal and energy giant Total to produce cosmetic packaging from carbon-capturing technology.

The technology captures emissions from industrial sites and uses a biological gas fermentation process to create ethanol. Like yeast fermenting sugar to make alcohol, LanzaTech uses a microbe – or a biocatalyst – to ferment the wasted carbon. The gases are captured from the flue stacks at industrial sites and fed to a bioreactor where the fermentation takes place.

A dehydration process can then be used to convert ethanol into ethylene, which can be polymerized into plastics.

By Louis Gore-Langton

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