Scientists Accidentally Create Mutant Enzyme That Eats Plastic Bottles (theguardian.com)

Scientists have created a mutant enzyme that breaks down plastic drinks bottles -- by accident. The breakthrough could help solve the global plastic pollution crisis by enabling for the first time the full recycling of bottles. From a report: The new research was spurred by the discovery in 2016 of the first bacterium that had naturally evolved to eat plastic, at a waste dump in Japan. Scientists have now revealed the detailed structure of the crucial enzyme produced by the bug. The international team then tweaked the enzyme to see how it had evolved, but tests showed they had inadvertently made the molecule even better at breaking down the PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic used for soft drink bottles. "What actually turned out was we improved the enzyme, which was a bit of a shock," said Prof John McGeehan, at the University of Portsmouth, UK, who led the research. "It's great and a real finding." The mutant enzyme takes a few days to start breaking down the plastic -- far faster than the centuries it takes in the oceans. But the researchers are optimistic this can be speeded up even further and become a viable large-scale process.

Comments

Can't wait for this to get loose

[dlingman]

If it gets loose, will it eat the bottles on the shelves? Will it also eat the fleece jackets made from recycled PET bottles?

Re:Can't wait for this to get loose

[reboot246]

If it can eat polyethylene, there go thousands of miles of natural gas main and services. Can you say "BOOM"?

It may be better to bring the plastic to the bacteria in a controlled environment than let the bacteria loose in the wild. They have a way of mutating into different strains really fast. Today PET, tomorrow the world!!

Re:Can't wait for this to get loose

[FatdogHaiku]

From just the summary, they tweaked the enzyme, not the bacteria.
As to the bacteria getting loose, they found it in a dump so it is loose already...

Re: Can't wait for this to get loose

[duke_cheetah2003]

Losing plastic would still be worth it.

Not really. We as a society are extremely dependent on this stuff. We use it for just about everything, from cars and machinery, to furnishings and toys, right down to medical tubing and syringes. We need our plastic, we don't have anything lined up to take its place in the modern world.

What we don't need is "disposable" plastic containers, these were an awful idea. Let's go back to glass. Sure it's heavier, but we can recycle it much easier and it's not such an annoyance in the wild.

If people would just use their brains, we could eliminate so much plastic waste. We've gone way off the deep-end with putting everything in "disposable" plastic containers.

This is fantastic!

[Gravis Zero]

I knew nature was going to catch on eventually (long before the "thousands of years to decay" prediction) and I'm glad it has. Plastics are nice but the half-life of the products they are used in are astonishingly short. My hope is that we will be able to spray trash with a variety of monocelluar critters and it will turn it into various gases that can be harvested and used for something else. Once they have done their job, they'll leave a biosludge and elemental components like metals that can be reclaimed. The sludge will make a great fertilizer.

I hope people realize this is a good thing rather than flailing nonsensically about how their iphone is going to fall apart.