Foogly is aimed at monopolizing the cliché "One person's trash is another person's treasure.” Food waste accounts for one percent of the total world GDP that ends up in landfills. One of Foogly’s missions is to use food waste as feedstocks for the synthesis of biopolymers and bioplastics. To date, no one-pot method exists for the scalable formation of bioplastics in water from food waste feedstocks. Our proposed approach is to “hijack” the catalytic pathways of microorganisms to produce and cure biopolymers through green chemistry methodologies. Preliminarily, a one-pot method of forming biopolymers from fungal waste has been successful. Our method bypasses the need of using organic solvents by homogenizing the food waste material and using native heme-enzymes to create, polymerize, and cure epoxy-resins into useful bioplastics.The dual value proposition is to convert food waste from landfill into a high-value, biodegradable feedstock.
Current Members
Graduate Student, Chemistry