Thanks to their wide range of application areas and easy accessibility, over 430 million tonnes of plastic are manufactured worldwide each year. Of these, hundreds of millions of tonnes of plastic waste are discarded annually.  Due to the lack of systematic waste management, they end up in landfills, the ocean, or the human body. Additionally, using petroleum-based polymeric materials to produce plastic is a highly energy-intensive process that has an adverse effect on the climate. Likewise, petroleum sources are depleting and will eventually be insufficient to meet human demand in the future. To address these issues, biodegradable and renewable plastics, or "bioplastics," are gaining popularity among academics and industry. Polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) are a well-known type of bioplastic that can be produced by microbial fermentation from renewable resources.

Compared to the conventional processes in the plastic industry, microbial fermentation of PHAs is typically constrained by high costs. This can be solved using cheaper carbon sources and reaching higher production titers. The goal of this project is to engineer a bacterial strain to enable the production of PHAs in high titers by assimilating non-food competitive carbon sources. In order to achieve this goal, synthetic biology and metabolic engineering techniques will be used to construct new pathways while knocking out natural genes responsible for the conversion of unwanted products in the genome of the selected bacterial strain.