OPENVIRO

The amount of waste littered in the open environment and causing pollution from harmful substances released from those waste streams, such as from plastic littering, has reached the level of a global emergency, especially affecting soil and water quality and biodiversity in land and marine environments. The overall low level of recycling of many waste streams, including collected plastic waste, is also part of such global pollution challenge. Biodegradability of materials and products for targeted applications may offer viable end-of-life solutions either in open environments or under controlled conditions, i.e., in composting plants and anaerobic digesters. OPENVIRO project aims to develop functional bioplastics with programmable performance in different ecosystems such aquatic, including marine and fresh waters, and terrestrial, specifically crop fields. The final goal is to solve challenges that predominantly arise from the widespread use of plastics in situations where their recovery for reuse or recycling proves either unfeasible or excessively costly. The strategy is founded in the design and generation of biohybrid materials based in two components: i) a biopolymer of bacterial or other origin with a biodegradable/compostable character, and ii) an active cargo or biological additives (bioadditives) consisting on hydrolytic enzymes or bacteria with either biocontrol, or plant-growth promoting capacities. Although the construction of such biohybrid materials with those programable applications has never been approached, as far as we learnt from the literature, the design of the components (polymers and bioadditives) are based on results derived from previous projects of team (see below), which ensures the feasibility of the OPENVIRO approach.