soukaina mahfoud

Beworm tackles the plastic waste problem through a biocatalytic recycling process inspired by nature.

Beworm develops a biocatalytic recycling process for polyethylene, the world’s most used plastic material while most recycling technologies address PET. We isolated plastics attacking bacteria and are analyzing the degradation mechanism to find its key enzymes. These enzymes can be optimized to split down low density polyethylene into virgin-like raw materials for the petrochemical industry. Compared to mechanical recycling methods, our solution creates a fully circular supply chain as the output are reusable with no downcycling of the plastic quality. The developed process fits within current recycling facilities as a complement to other technologies, enabling the recyclers to increase the output reusable material from the input sorted plastics. The process will have plastics put in reactors under certain environmental conditions, in contact with the enzyme substrate. The enzymatic reaction will break the chain of polymers into states usable to manufacture new plastics.