Toronto Scientist, Luna Yu, Receives Share of $2 billion from Amazon for New Recycling Process

Amazon is investing a portion of its $2 billion climate change fund to Luna Yu and her company, Genecis, for her work in converting food waste into plastics.

Luna Yu, the CEO and founder of Genecis, is a 28-year-old Toronto based scientist who has created a process that feeds waste to bacteria that eventually becomes single-use plastics.

“It’s super simple.  It’s almost like brewing a beer, right? All you have to do is to actually feed food waste as a sort of energy source of food to bacteria,” Yu explained.

The process sees bacteria consume sugars and fatty acids from organic waste. From there, it metabolizes, converting that waste into a biodegradable called Polyhydroxyalkanoate, or PHA.

PHA is then extracted, purified, and made into pellets, which are then injected into molding machines and finally made into single-use plastics. PHAs have also been used to make textiles during this process.

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