 We use a ton of plastics every day Now I know you're all thinking like okay. Wow, Milica. What else is new? But just because it's an old news doesn't mean that it's less of a problem Now we don't have to be so strict on ourselves because we are all making a collective effort We're using reusable water bottles. We switch to plastics straws from plastic straws obviously However, have you been to the supermarket lately if you go to the supermarket and I'll see all of these vegetables and fruits packed in Approximately a cubic meter of packaging you realize that we still have a long way to go The materials that we are using for this are hardly ideal candidates in order to make them We need to use oil derivatives and very high temperatures Apart from this this process generates a ton of greenhouse gases as well as About five trillion micro plastic particle pieces that are floating in our oceans and our organs. I Know it's not a nice feeling right now However, we also have to be realistic with ourselves Plastic has become such an intrinsic part of our lives that it's very hard to actually let it go completely but what we can do is to search for new and alternative materials and Ideally such a material would be made from renewable resources in an environmentally friendly way and be or have the potential to become cheap and Once such material already exists and it's made from the chemical called FDCA Now if for a second you think about Remnants of the wood industry as well as food waste these are essentially trash But they contain simple sugars that are not that different to the one we put in our tea and My job is to transform these sugars into FDCA with the help of nature or more precisely enzymes Enzymes are everywhere from helping us grow digesting our food or baking bread. They are part of almost every process on earth They are usually found in fungi and bacteria and they love water and very mild reaction conditions Moreover, we can bind them to a solid support and then we can easily remove them and reuse them Now what I've done in my research is basically that I have been trying to establish and establish a Cascade reaction in which by combining engineering and science we could Use plant and food waste to make FDCA using two different enzymes not to mention Potentially revolutionizing the way we produce our materials in that we use in our everyday lives and helped our planet Just a tiny bit