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A SIMPLE soil bacterium could convert a toxic waste material, styrene, into a valuable biodegradable plastic.

The chemical industry produces copious quantities of dirty styrene – 25,000 tonnes a year in the US alone – that has to be buried or burnt. Now Kevin O’Connor’s team at University College Dublin in Ireland have shown that a bacterium called Pseudomonas putida strain CA3 can turn this styrene into polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA), a biodegradable plastic used for cups, cutlery, packaging and medical implants.

O’Connor presented his results at the annual meeting of the Society for General Microbiology in Dublin last week.