Polystyrene (PS) is one of the most
used yet infrequently
recycled
plastics. Although manufactured on the scale of 300 million tons per
year globally, current approaches toward PS degradation are energy-
and carbon-inefficient, slow, and/or limited in the value that they
reclaim. We recently reported a scalable process to degrade post-consumer
polyethylene-containing waste streams into carboxylic diacids. Engineered
fungal strains then upgrade these diacids biosynthetically to synthesize
pharmacologically active secondary metabolites. Herein, we apply a
similar reaction to rapidly convert PS to benzoic acid in high yield.
Engineered strains of the filamentous fungus Aspergillus
nidulans then biosynthetically upgrade PS-derived
crude benzoic acid to the structurally diverse secondary metabolites
ergothioneine, pleuromutilin, and mutilin. Further, we expand the
catalog of plastic-derived products to include spores of the industrially
relevant biocontrol agent Aspergillus flavus Af36 from crude PS-derived benzoic acid.
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