UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Season 4 of the "Growing Impact" podcast opens with an episode that dives into plastic waste, specifically plastic film, and a potential biological solution to help upcycle the material. The episode, which is available on Sept. 1, features Gamini Mendis, assistant professor of engineering at Penn State Behrend; Luciana Aronne, associate teaching professor of chemistry at Penn State Behrend; and Josephine Wee, assistant professor of food science at University Park. The team discusses the challenges of plastic waste handling and how fungi could be a solution that converts plastic into useful products.
“Plastic film is really tricky from a couple of different perspectives,” said Mendis. “One is that there's a whole lot of it. It's really light, and it's hard to recycle. There aren't a great number of ways to economically, and that's really the key here — economically, recycle plastic film.”
The team’s inspiration came from a Netflix documentary that featured a segment on fungi that cleared water polluted with oil.
“Plastics have a hydrocarbon backbone just like petroleum products,” said Aronne. “Wouldn't it be great if these fungi could work on plastics, and wouldn't it be great if in the future people could use these spores in a composting process at home and be totally responsible for their plastic waste?”
According to the team, that goal is still far into the future. The first step is studying different fungi that could potentially break plastic down.
“If you harness the power of fungi’s ability to rot wood, which is a pretty complex carbon source, and apply that to the idea of plastics — which is a man-made product, but I think you can take the same approach — you can harness the fungi’s ability to break down or chew up plastic’s complex carbon backbones,” said Wee.
The team also wants to explore the results of the plastic degradation, which could result in biological carbon or microplastics.
“Are we turning it completely into a mushroom or into mycelium that we can do something with? Or are we just causing it to crumble and break down into microplastics?” said Mendis. “One of those routes is good. One of those is really bad, and we want to figure out what's going to happen and engineer it so that we drive it to that conversion into biological carbon and not into a microplastic mess that makes everything worse.”
“Growing Impact” is a podcast by the Institutes of Energy and the Environment (IEE). It features Penn State researchers who have been awarded IEE seed grants and discusses their foundational work as they further their projects. In Season 4, the podcast expanded, and it includes longer conversations with more interdisciplinary team members, and it focuses on the challenges the projects are addressing and the proposed solutions being investigated. The podcast is available on multiple platforms, including Apple, Google, Amazon and Spotify.