A Bacteria Has Been Discovered that Eats Plastic. An Enzyme it Produces Actually is What Breaks Down the Plastic. We Could Spray it on Ocean Plastic Waste and Get Rid of This Waste Once and For All.

Recycling hope for plastic-hungry enzyme

Scientists have improved a naturally occurring enzyme which can digest some of our most commonly polluting plastics. PET, the strong plastic commonly used in bottles, takes hundreds of years to break down in the environment. The modified enzyme, known as PETase, can start breaking down the same material in just a few days.

 From article, (Polyesters, industrially produced from petroleum, are widely used in plastic bottles and clothing.

Current recycling processes mean that polyester materials follow a downward quality spiral, losing some of their properties each time they go through the cycle. Bottles become fleeces, then carpets, after which they often end up in landfill.

PET, the strong plastic commonly used in bottles, takes hundreds of years to break down in the environment.

Researchers reported in 2016 that they had found [a bacterial] strain living in sediments at a bottle recycling site in the port city of Sakai.

[The bacteria] Ideonella sakaiensis uses the plastic as its major energy source.

discovered in Japan, the enzyme produced by [the] bacterium "eats" PET.

"[PET] has only been around in vast quantities over the last 50 years, so it's actually not a very long timescale for a bacteria to have evolved to eat something so man-made," commented Prof John McGeehan, who was involved in the current study.

Polyesters, the group of plastics that PET (also called polyethylene terephthalate) belongs to, do occur in nature.

"They protect plant leaves," explained the University of Portsmouth researcher. "Bacteria have been evolving for millions of years to eat that."

The switch to PET was nevertheless "quite unexpected" and an international team of scientists set out to determine how the PETase enzyme had evolved.

The modified enzyme, known as PETase, can start breaking down [plastic] material in just a few days.

This could revolutionise the recycling process, allowing plastics to be re-used more effectively.

PETase was also tested on PEF plastic, a proposed plant-based alternative to PET that is similarly slow to degrade in nature.

"We were absolutely stunned when we did that experiment because it actually works better on PEF than PET," Prof McGeehan told BBC News.

PETase reverses the manufacturing process, reducing polyesters to their building blocks, ready to be used again.

The enzyme is a number of years away from being deployed on a widespread scale. It will need to degrade PET faster than its current time of a few days before becoming economically viable as part of the recycling landscape.

Prof McGeehan is hopeful that this marks the beginning of a shift in the management of plastics.

"There is an urgent need to reduce the amount of plastic that ends up in landfill and the environment, and I think if we can adopt these technologies we actually have a potential solution in the future to doing that" he added.)

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