In a world so awash in plastic waste, what’s happening in the oceans puts it into sharp focus.
Twelve million tons of plastic — enough to fill a garbage truck each minute — are widely estimated to find their way into the sea each year. Hundreds of millions of tons already lie on the seabed. United Kingdom researchers say the 57 million tons of the world’s yearly plastic pollution is enough to fill New York City’s Central Park with waste as high as the Empire State Building. Slow to degrade and prone to breaking into particles, such plastics can be ingested by marine life and end up in the human food chain.
As the blight of plastic worsens, a biomanufacturing upstart called Mango Materials — with guidance from Black & Veatch, a global critical infrastructure leader — is pressing to innovatively do something about it, with a bonus: mitigating a greenhouse gas linked to climate change.
Mango Materials has visions of broadly applying the technology that has been demonstrated at a wastewater treatment site in Vacaville, California. The plan: commercially take the biogas methane — a heat-trapping greenhouse gas, second in abundance only to carbon dioxide but far more potent in trapping radiation — generated by treating municipal or industrial wastewater and transform it into biodegradable plastic (nontoxic polyhydroxyalkanoate, or PHA) for everyday uses. Mango Materials’ creations so far have ranged from soap dishes to sunglasses frames for Stella McCartney’s luxury fashion brand — even a biopolymer for a carbon-negative shoe by Allbirds. Other possible uses include packaging, landscape products, textile fibers, and potentially medical and food-related applications.
Sorting out the ins and outs of widening that footprint has been entrusted to Black & Veatch.
More than a century old and sharing Mango Materials’ vigor for sustainability, Black & Veatch is an expert in gas fermentation and downstream processing and collaborates with transformative facility conceptual designs and techno-economic assessments. It’s also evaluating the feasibility of scaling up the process through decentralized plants in “low-resource environments” — places such as small wastewater treatment sites or other waste methane sources.
The promise can’t be understated. Mango Materials envisions accessing as much methane as it can score from wastewater plants or other waste gas sources across the landscape, providing a revenue stream for a gas that often is simply burned off. The biomanufacturing facility design being explored could become a platform licensable elsewhere. And voilà, commercial scale.
This ambition stars tiny bacteria, which, when fed methane from the Easterly Wastewater Treatment Plant’s anaerobic digesters, accumulate the biopolymer polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA) within their cells. That PHA then gets parsed out downstream, purified and turned into a powder that, when compounded with other ingredients, becomes pellets that can be injection molded into whatever the imagination conceives.
Pellets created as part of the process can be transformed into a myriad of biodegradable products.
Across the challenging gas fermentation landscape, where few have achieved commercialization, companies have been developing ways to convert carbon dioxide — another greenhouse gas — into bioplastics. But Mango Materials is pioneering leveraging bacterial fermentation to convert methane into PHA at scale and is now exploring how to significantly advance its “Launch Facility” — a fully integrated methane-to-PHA site with 5000L fermentation capacity - to full-scale commercialization.
Part of the mission: determine how to achieve cost parity with polyethylene or other conventional plastics made from petroleum.
How quickly the plastic biodegrades after its usefulness ends varies according to the environment and the material’s thickness.
BioMADE, a nonprofit encouraging the development of biomanufacturing technologies and funded by the Department of Defense, is helping fund the effort, having announced in October 2024 a $26.9 million investment in 17 projects, including Mango Materials, supporting U.S. bio-industrial manufacturing innovations and workforce development. The University of California at Davis is collaborating on workforce considerations.
Mango Materials knows that a better, cleaner world awaits with biodegradable plastic, well aware of scientists’ estimates that just 9 percent of plastic is recycled globally. Most of it — some 70 percent — finds its way into landfills or the environment.
A welcome thought for the marine life that calls the ocean their home.
