The Industrial Revolution led to great technological, economic, social and cultural changes, and these entailed the appearance of waste and pollution coming from the industry and energy sectors, such as plastic polymers, chemical solvents, metals, and radioactive waste and greenhouse gases. They impact heavily in our ecosystems and health, and despite the technological advances and the management strategies to minimise them, they cause 19 millions of premature deaths annually according to the UNEP.

Scientists of the Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) are involved in the European project MADONNA (Microbial deployment of new-to-nature chemistries for refactoring the barriers between living and non-living matter), aimed at eliminating industrial waste and pollutants by means of synthetic biology and biotechnology. MADONNA will also explore potential scenarios to transform industry into a sustainable and cyclic process. The UPF team is led by Ricard Solé, ICREA researcher at this university and principal investigator at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE), a joint centre of the CSIC and the UPF.

Closing the loop

“Planet Earth has evolved through millions of years as a cyclic system in equilibrium, and it has been sustained by the energy of the Sun”, Solé explains. “Industrial production, however, can be understood as an artificial metabolic system in which raw matters become products”, he continues. While the biological or the geochemical cycles of the planet are cyclical, these processes are unidirectional and generate a lot of waste and pollutants only a small fraction of which is returned to the system. Taking the principles of the circular economy into account, MADONNA aims at translating the reactions of synthetic biology to industries so that waste and pollutants can be reused and the system can become cyclical. A sustainable industrial model, in which industrial waste and pollutants are assets and not liabilities, is the main expected outcome of this project.

Many chemical reactions, say the capture of carbon dioxide, take place in nature. Others, like plastic degradation or nitrogen fixation in the presence of oxygen, occur rarely or do not occur. The shift of paradigm suggested here involves introducing chemical reactions not found in nature but usual in industry and chemical engineering, into biological networks. “With MADONNA, we will redesign and even create chemical reactions not present in nature with the aim of repairing the harm exerted in the biosphere and slow down the anthropogenic impacts on the environment”, states Solé.

As the scientists say, “our current society depends, on the one hand, on the development of new products that can run processes of the chemical engineering domain in an environmentally friendly way and at low energy cost; on the other hand, the limitation of greenhouse gas emissions and the generation of chemical waste that harm our planet”. MADONNA wants to face these challenges by leading the production processes towards a biochemical metabolism and moving them away from the merely industrial and external-to-the-biological-processes’ metabolism

“The project will have a transforming effect in the industrial chemistry. By combining the disciplines of biology, chemistry and engineering in industry, MADONNA will radically change the biotechnological innovation outlook”, Solé puts.

The project MADONNA will be four years long and its budget is of nearly 3 million euros. Led by the Spanish Council for Scientific Research (CSIC), MADONNA will be executed by an international scientific consortium. Its funding comes from the FET Open – Future and Emerging Technologies call, which belongs to the programme Horizon 2020 of the European Commission. This call is open to revolutionary research lines which combine advanced multidisciplinary science and avant-garde engineering.