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Biorenewable and circular polydiketoenamine plastics

Nature Sustainability volume 6, pages 1426–1435 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

Amid growing concerns over the human health and environmental impacts of plastic waste, the most promising solution would be to build a circular plastics economy where sustainability considerations dictate the full life cycle of plastics use including replacing petrochemicals with biorenewables. Here we show that by incorporating the polyketide triacetic acid lactone (TAL) in polydiketoenamines (PDK) we increase the working temperature of these circular plastics, opening the door wider to applications where circularity is urgently needed. By varying the number of carbons of TAL-derived monomers, both polymer properties and recycling efficiency are affected. Simply using glucose as the main carbon source, we engineered a process for producing bioTAL under fed-batch fermentation. A systems analysis of this bioprocess under different scenarios quantifies the environmental and economic benefits of PDK plastics and the risks when implemented at an industrial scale, providing opportunities in biorenewable circularity.

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Fig. 1: Biorenewable circularity in PDK plastics derived from TAL.
Fig. 2: Recycling of TAL-PDK formulations.
Fig. 3: Biosynthesis of triacetic acid lactone (bioTAL) and biorenewable TAL-PDK characterization.
Fig. 4: Systems analysis of the production of bioTAL.

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Data availability

The authors declare that the data supporting the findings of this study are available within the paper and its Supplementary Information. Crystallographic data for compounds TAL-TK 1, TAL-TK 3 and TAL-TK 5 are available free of charge from the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (www.ccdc.cam.ac.uk) under reference numbers 2223455, 2223456 and 2223457, respectively.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge support from the United States Department of Energy (DOE) Bioenergy Technologies Office award no. 1916-1597. Portions of this work—including polymer synthesis, recycling and characterization—were carried out as a User Project at the Molecular Foundry, which is supported by the Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, of the DOE under contract no. DE-AC02-05CH11231. This work was supported by the Joint BioEnergy Institute (https://www.jbei.org), which is supported by the DOE, Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research under contract no. DE-AC02-05CH11231. The Solid-State NMR instrument used in this work is supported by the National Science Foundation under grant no. 2018784. This research used resources of the Advanced Light Source, which is a DOE Office of Science User Facility under contract no. DE-AC02-05CH11231. We thank A. Lund for her help with the solid-state NMR data acquisition. We thank S. L. Nordahl for helpful discussions on LCA analysis.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Molecular Foundry, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Jeremy Demarteau, Benjamin Cousineau & Brett A. Helms

  2. Joint BioEnergy Institute, Emeryville, CA, USA

    Zilong Wang, Seokjung Cheong, Guangxu Lan, Nawa R. Baral, Corinne D. Scown, Jay D. Keasling & Brett A. Helms

  3. Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering & Department of Bioengineering, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Zilong Wang, Seokjung Cheong & Jay D. Keasling

  4. QB3 Institute, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Zilong Wang, Seokjung Cheong & Jay D. Keasling

  5. Biological Systems and Engineering Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Zilong Wang, Baishakhi Bose, Seokjung Cheong, Guangxu Lan, Nawa R. Baral, Corinne D. Scown & Jay D. Keasling

  6. Advanced Light Source, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Simon J. Teat

  7. Energy Analysis and Environmental Impacts Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Corinne D. Scown

  8. Energy & Biosciences Institute, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Corinne D. Scown

  9. Center for Synthetic Biochemistry, Shenzhen Institutes for Advanced Technologies, Shenzhen, People’s Republic of China

    Jay D. Keasling

  10. The Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability, Technical University Denmark, Kemitorvet, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark

    Jay D. Keasling

  11. Materials Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Brett A. Helms

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  1. Jeremy Demarteau
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the conceptualization of the project. J.D., B.C. and B.A.H. contributed the methodology for polymer design and chemical recycling. B.B., N.R.B. and C.D.S. contributed the methodology for systems analysis. Z.W., S.C., G.L. and J.D.K. contributed the methodology for bioTAL production. S.J.T. contributed the methodology for monomer characterization by X-ray diffraction. All authors contributed to analysing the data. B.A.H., J.D., Z.W. and B.B. wrote the original draft. All authors contributed to writing the final draft and editing. B.A.H. and J.D. contributed to visualization. B.A.H. supervised the research. J.D.K., C.D.S. and B.A.H. provided project administration. J.D.K., C.D.S. and B.A.H. acquired funding.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Brett A. Helms.

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Competing interests

The authors declare the following competing interests: B.A.H. is an inventor on the US provisional patent application 62/587,148 submitted by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory that covers PDKs, as well as aspects of their use and recovery. B.A.H., J.D. and J.D.K. are inventors on the US provisional patent application 63/390,962 submitted by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory that covers TAL-PDKs, as well as aspects of their use and recovery. J.D.K. has a financial interest in Amyris, Lygos, Demetrix, Napigen, Maple Bio, Apertor Labs, Berkeley Yeast, Ansa Biotechnologies and Zero Acre Farms. B.A.H., J.D.K. and C.D.S. have a financial interest in Cyklos Materials. The remaining authors declare no competing interests.

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Supplementary Methods, Notes 1–4, Figs. 1–35, Tables 1–11 and refs. 54–67.

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Demarteau, J., Cousineau, B., Wang, Z. et al. Biorenewable and circular polydiketoenamine plastics. Nat Sustain 6, 1426–1435 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-023-01160-2

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