“I definitely have a better balance now between work and life,” admits Dr O’Connor.
Fascinated by science, a career in microbiology was always his first choice. “I found my undergraduate degree very interesting, but it was at postgraduate level that I found out, yes, I really am interested in this. I definitely wanted to pursue research,” he says.
Dr O’Connor from the UCD School of Biomolecular and Biomedical Science, and the Centre for Synthesis and Chemical Biology, first studied biodegradation, or the use of micro-organisms to degrade toxic compounds for his doctorate. He then undertook postdoctoral research in the Netherlands and Switzerland where he worked on using micro-organisms to make valuable compounds, in a process known as biocatalysis.
In 1999 he returned to Ireland and started in University College Dublin that same year. At first he was predominantly lecturing, but one year later his research group started up when he took on his first PhD student.
His current research in the field of biocatalysis has received a lot of attention recently but he’s been working on it since 2000. Making biodegradable plastic using different organisms was already a well-known procedure, one that the microbiologist and his team planned to expand on.
“What we were trying to do was come up with a different approach. We were asking if pollutants couldbe converted into valuable products like biodegradable plastic?”
The original compound that Dr O’Connor used in the process was styrene, the main ingredient of polystyrene. But the team realised that the conversion of polystyrene itself to biodegradable plastics would be of greater value.
However, their particular bacterium didn’t grow on polystyrene. So he contacted Professor Walter Kaminsky in the University of Hamburg, an expert in pyrolysis – a special technique that uses temperatures of up to 520 degrees to heat the plastic in a vacuum, producing a liquid form of the styrene.
Dr O’Connor had a fair idea that their bug would grow when fed this styrene oil, and indeed it did, producing the biodegradable plastic PHA (polyhydroxalkanoate).
Extracting this plastic from the bacteria is a very simple procedure that involves soaking the bugs in a mild detergent. “Basically the detergent rips the bugs open in order to extract the small granules of plastic from each cell,” explains Dr O’Connor. The plastic is cleaned and it is then ready to be used.
At the industrial level, the two-step process is carried out on a large scale, producing up to 1,000 litres of plastic – that’s a lot of bugs. Dr O’Connor is now working on improving the efficiency of the technique, using a combination of feeding and molecular strategies. At present some 30-35% of each bacterium is plastic; his team are looking to increase this yield to as much as 80%.
There are a myriad of potential uses for the PHA plastic. A recyclable plastic, it will be environmentally friendly, but Dr O’Connor also believes that its uses will extend beyond mere packaging. As it is biodegradable, it will be safe for use in the body and thus could have many possible medical applications. This is in contrast to conventionally recycled plastic.
“Polystyrene is a very recyclable plastic,” stresses Dr O’Connor. The problem is, once it’s recycled, people aren’t quite sure what to do with it. Recycled polystyrene produces a plastic of a lower grade and so it cannot be used in the food industry. It can be made into ‘timber look’ plastic for making picnic tables and chairs, for example, but O’Connor says the market for this is limited.
“People tend not to recycle it because there’s no end use, or a very small end use,” he explains.
Currently, polystyrene for recycling is exported to China. But Dr O’Connor believes this is an inefficient practice, and proposes instead a municipal recycling scheme, where people deposit their waste plastic.
“Transporting polystyrene halfway across the world to recycle it is not environmentally friendly. My attitude is that you should really be recycling on site.”
And this revolutionary method of recycling is not limited to polystyrene, or Dr O’Connor’s particular bug, for that matter.
“We have used our technology for polystyrene but you can apply the same strategy to recycling any plastic. Also there are hundreds of different bacteria that will make different types of plastic so opportunities are huge,” he says.
While PHA is still emerging in terms of world markets, O’Connor maintains that in the future this will change, with people looking at alternatives to traditional plastic.
Judging from the large pile of plastic bottles in the corner of his office, Dr O’Connor is not just concerned with recycling in the lab. In fact, along with a Masters student, he was responsible for setting up the paper recycling scheme within University College Dublin, which they ran for about 18 months before the university took the reins.
“When I first came back here in 1999, I came from Switzerland where everything was recycled and I was appalled at what was going in here,” he recalls.
Back in the lab, however, he remains excited by his work and the collaboration between chemistry and microbiology from which it resulted. Dr O’Connor sees such cross-disciplinary collaborations as a major source of new innovations.
“People have to have respect for other people’s areas of expertise. I love collaborating - it really does work,” he says.
So when he’s not saving the planet, or running marathons, what else does Kevin O’Connor do? He grins. “I sleep!”