Paper short abstract:

This paper opens up 'microbial factories' to investigate the multi-scalar transformations they enact in the name of carbon recycling, defossilisation and circular economies. Are they best understood as ecomodernist technofixes, or as forms of ecological reparation?

Paper long abstract:

Microbial capacities for material transformation are increasingly mobilised to repair damaged ecologies at a range of scales. In synthetic biology and industrial biotechnology, the development of 'microbial factories' for the conversion of various feedstocks into materials, chemicals, fuels and food is heralded as a means of addressing climate change, reducing societal reliance on fossil resources, and creating circular economies. While social studies of synthetic biology have explored promissory discourses (e.g., Schyfter and Calvert, 2015) and factory metaphors (e.g., Boudry and Pigliucci, 2013), less attention has been paid to the relational reconfigurations and resource-making enacted by microbial factories and their more-than-human labour.

This paper explores multispecies collaboration towards material, chemical, social and ecological transformation in the case of a European research project that developed three new microbial factories in a waste treatment plant in Italy. The researchers and companies involved aimed to engineer microbes to (more efficiently) use carbon dioxide to produce chemicals and bioplastics. Through the microbial labour of fermentation, waste gains worth as gas feedstocks are converted into commercially valuable materials, fixing carbon and offering 'sustainable' chemical production processes.

Drawing on embedded STS research in this project, the paper opens up microbial factories to investigate the multi-scalar collaborations and transformations they (might) entail. It interrogates tensions between logics of biocapitalist exploitation and of industrial reparation, asking whether microbial factories are best understood as ecomodernist technofixes, or as the becoming 'ecologically obliged' (Papadopoulos, 2022; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017) of synthetic biology, waste treatment and chemical industries.