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Cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, can be used as host to produce polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA), which are promising bioplastic raw materials. The most important material thereof is polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB), which can replace the commodity polymer polypropylene (PP) in many applications, yielding a bio-based, biodegradable alternative solution. The advantage from using cyanobacteria to make PHB over the standard fermentation processes, with sugar or other organic (waste)
materials as feedstock, is that the sustainability is better (compare first-generation biofuels with the feed vs. fuel debate), with CO2 being the only carbon source and sunlight being the sole energy source. In this review article, the state of the art of cyanobacterial PHB production and its outlook is discussed. Thirty-seven percent of
dry cell weight of PHB could be obtained in 2018, which is getting close to up to 78% of PHB dry cell weight in heterotrophic microorganisms in fermentation reactors. A good potential for cyanobacterial PHB is seen throughout the literature.
Industrial and institutional floor cleaning today relies on mechanical action combined with chemicals, which is costly and a burden to the environment. There are floor cleaning pads on the market which claim increased service time due to diamond particles contained in the nonwoven materials. In this study, it was investigated whether cleaning results can also be obtained with hard-particle-coated pads using only water. SiC, diamond and Al 2 O 3 were used with particle sizes between 5 and 125 µm. 5 g/m² of hard particles were applied to the pads in epoxy resin. Weight loss from abrasive cleaning in 500 cycles and gloss increase were measured. Diamond and silicon carbide particles were found to work with pure water, without the need for chemical cleaning agents.