In the Media

Xin Liu SM ’17, art curator for the Media Lab’s Space Exploration Initiative, and Pat Pataranutaporn, a graduate student, speak with Mashable video producer Teodosia Dobriyanova about why sending plastic-eating bacteria to space could aid sustainability efforts. “We envision that in the future when astronauts, as they travel deeper into space, they’ll need to do what we call in-situ resource utilization,” says Pataranutaporn. “So using the materials that already exists there, in this case plastic waste, to upcycle it into new materials.”