In the 1967 film "The Graduate," Mr. McGuire advises protagonist Ben Braddock, "There's a great future in plastics." A handful of recent UC Davis graduates have heeded that advice and are building the next generation of plastic.

Their company, Micromidas, processes sewage sludge, the hardened layer of waste from sewage treatment facilities, into Polyhydroxyalkanoates, or PHAs. Simply put, it turns poop into plastic.

Founder and CEO John Bissell said he was motivated ethically and economically to form a truly "green" plastic company in all aspects of production. Micromidas uses bio-waste and biological methods to create biodegradable plastic.

The idea that in the right conditions, bugs create PHAs, first came to Bissell and his friends doing external research at UCD. In April 2008, Bissell partnered with six other UCD students to replicate these conditions, and their experiment won first place in the Environmental Protection Agency's "People, Prosperity and the Planet" competition.

As a result, they received a $75,000 two-year grant, which was dispersed earlier this year. They then attended UCD's Green Technology Entrepreneurship Academy, where they learned how to realize their business' potential.

Their business methods are both complicated and somewhat confidential, said Bissell, who has a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering. Micromidas' office in West Sacramento currently holds the company's 10 full-time workers and six interns.

"The main thing I do here is screen for productive microbes that will make a lot of plastic under the conditions that we want," said Casey McGrath, director of biological research and UCD alumnus with a bachelor's in biochemistry. "One of the things that is difficult is figuring out which bugs make plastic in an easy way."

That question was solved by taking an agar jelly plate and putting bugs with dyes and chemicals into the plate. The bugs will uptake those dyes and chemicals, and if those chemicals bind to plastic then they will glow under an ultraviolet light.

There are also homemade bug sorters, a bug library and a bug graveyard.

"We take millions (of) bacteria out of a pond," Bissell said. "There are certain characteristics that bacteria have to have to be PHA-producing bacteria. So we apply selective conditioning so only those bacteria can survive. So it sorts it down from a million to maybe a thousand bacteria."

When a not-yet-finalized formula of those micro-bugs interacts with sludge from Sacramento and Yolo County waste-water treatment plants, they create a kilo of PHA in five to six days.

As for their PHA, "It has no toxicity level at all," Bissell said. "You could eat it."

He demonstrated its superior physical properties over the most produced bioplastic, polylactic acid, or PLA. He noted how one popular PLA product, a cup made of corn starch, melted when holding hot water. The PHA, he said, has a higher melting point.

PHA is sold in pellets and can turn into anything, Bissell said: cards, bottles, anything you can fit into a thermal injection mold. Micromidas is currently in talks with Johnson and Johnson, Pepsi and Nestlé to purchase their product.

"The bugs need to work (well enough) to go to commercial scale; they're nowhere near the optimum formula," Bissell said. "The next step is to set up a satellite office, commercial plant, and expand from that."