Everything on this table is PHA
PHA is a real plastic, but it is made by microbes instead of oil. And because it is something living things already make, living things can take it back apart again.
Microbes make it, not refineries
Feed plant sugars to certain bacteria and they do what we do with spare energy: they store it. In their case as PHA, packed into granules inside the cell, much like our bodies store fat.
Keep feeding them and they keep stockpiling, until a cell is mostly plastic by weight. Chemically the result is a polyester, the same broad family as the plastic in drinks bottles. The difference is what made it.
Harvested, not refined
The cells are broken open, the PHA is separated out and cleaned, and it is melted into pellets.
From that point on it is simply plastic in a sack, handled like any other.
It runs on the machines that exist
No new factory, no new moulds. The same machines making plastic packaging today can make it out of PHA instead.
Which is exactly why getting the settings right matters so much. The machine is willing. It just needs to be told how.
And then it is food again
Ordinary plastic breaks into smaller and smaller pieces and then stays there. Soil and sea microbes recognise PHA as something edible, because it is, and break it down into water and carbon dioxide.
Not fragments that hang around for centuries. Gone.
Everything on this table is PHA. Pick it up.
