The African University of Science and Technology (AUST), Nigeria, in collaboration with the Sheda Science and Technology Complex, an arm of the Federal Ministry of Science and Technology, is taking frontier materials science and applying it to areas of environmental remediation. The university is using bacteria to address the menace of plastic waste and oil spillage. According to Wole Soboyejo, the vice president of AUST, “The basic idea in the remediation of the environment is whether we can use bacteria to eat up oil spills or whether we can use bacteria to eat up plastics. We have actually identified the bacteria that breaks down plastics; we are doing the degradation experiments to see what the potential is for scale-up. We are also now identifying some bacteria that can clean up oil spills which we are also testing to see what their likely environment impact would be after the oil has been broken down into subcomponents.” AUST has been working in a partnership on this project for over 10 years. The partnership has led to the formation of a Nigerian nanotechnology initiative with the aim of building human capacity efforts that could multiply the impact of the project, Soboyejo added.

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