The best features in recycling

22 May 2012
Last updated: 14 hours ago
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Craptastic Plastic

Making something useful out of a waste material is nearly always a wonderful thing to do, but you might just draw the line at making bioplastic from human waste.

A small company from California thinks it’s a good idea, though, and has already developed technology through which a microbe digests human waste to create a polymer that forms the basis of a bioplastic.

To ‘satisfy the squeamish’, the makers, Micromidas, assert that the material will not be used in conjunction with food products. Whether or not that will indeed satisfy the squeamish remains to be seen, but at the very least, they can take heart from the fact that it neither looks nor smells like human poo, apparently.

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Making something useful out of a waste material is nearly always a wonderful thing to do, but you might just draw the line at making bioplastic from human waste.