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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.
If it gets loose, will it eat the bottles on the shelves? Will it also eat the fleece jackets made from recycled PET bottles?
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2368220.Mutant_59
Plastics evolve antibodies to fight off plastic-eating bacteria.
So we have to go back to crystal and paper containers.
Does the enzyme release CO2, (or any other greenhouse gases), while it's breaking down the plastic?
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
How many inventions were the result of accidents? Microwave ovens? Telephone?
This is the precursor to the great plastic plague of 2020
So the churches have been wrong all along. The end of things won't be a fiery death but everything dissolving into the classical grey goo syndrome. Imagine if this got loose in a hospital, all the tubes and plastic based equipment dissolving around the patients and doctors.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Plastic which was born out of an accident is about to die because of another accident..
Enzyme + PET equals what exactly? Surely not nothing. Hopefully something harmless.
Long signatures suck.
I can see endless military applications.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
I was wondering the same thing but came up with an explanation that both are correct; speeded is even correcter but sped up is a modern take on it. So both equally correct.
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.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Actually, the traditional (and now very out-of-date) wisdom is that "speeded" should only be used with "up". So your complaint would be silly even if we did still subscribe to thy 19th century grammatical peeves. Forsooth!
http://grammarist.com/usage/sp...
Kill it now! I don't want want retro 8-bit gizmos disappearing into a puddle of bacteria poop!
I think some people are being confused by the use of the term "mutant" in the headline. This is not a creature. It doesn't reproduce. It's a chemical. You can worry about spills, but it's never going to be a plague.
The bacteria it was derived from might become a plague, but that's an already-existing worry, since it's a naturally occurring critter which is already out there in the wild. But this is just stuff. If it "gets loose", it'll just sit there. At worst, it might contaminate the groundwater or something, but that's true of a lot of other chemicals.
No, seriously.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Why not just burn all that shit? No silly enzymes or science required.
They could do the same thing with H2SO4
H2SO4 you would notice instantly (if for no other reason than the pilots would be unable to see out of the cockpit), and wouldn't have the supervillian level of diabolical delay before taking effect.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It would be really daft to make a ship's hull out of PET - but "sailcloth is typically made from PET fibers also known as polyester or under the brand name Dacron"... be interesting when you have to buy a new sail just the old one was eaten.
But, yes, that is a concern, especially seeing as this enzyme was borrowed from a bacterium that evolved it naturally. It won't be long before another does the same, or this one gets into the wild.
It has to be said... of all the things to moan about, this is the most minor.
Buy sturdy bags. Don't have a problem. Or do what I did for most of my childhood, and which I've seen practised all over the world, most recently in rural Italian stores... which is grab the big cardboard boxes from the back of the store (they used to just have a big area laid out that they put empty packaging into), use those to pack your shopping into for the brief periods of a) putting into your car, b) taking out of your car at home.
Pretty much the plastic bag thing had gotten silly and we were using crappy plastic where a single cardboard box could do ten journeys, better, more manageably, more easily. Then by the time you come to re-use the crappy plastic bags, they were disintegrated, UV-destroyed or just plain torn to pieces and fragile.
To be honest, I still haven't worked out why I'm not just given a box / set of boxes that perfectly fits the trolley/cart when I walk in, then I fill it/them with my goods, and then put them straight in the back of the car. All this packing-and-unpacking nonsense at the checkout/car/home is a total waste of time.
I say this as someone who ALWAYS forgets to take bags, and hence ends up paying for lots of "life" bags (more sturdy, more expensive ones) when I really don't need to. But I guarantee that I've used less plastic in all that time even so, and I have a huge box full of really sturdy re-useable bags to boot... I used them when I moved house months ago.
But everything from small stores in Italy, large supermarkets in London many years ago, to strange oddments stores have had just a huge selection of their empty cardboard boxes by the tills ready for anyone to use in preference to a bag. Why it's not present in the larger stores, or indeed every store, I can't imagine. I can only think that the empty cardboard boxes are worth MORE to the store than giving them away - whether by people paying for bags unnecessarily, or just some recycling subsidy from the producers.
+1
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
Polystyrene foam is notoriously hard to recycle and a common type of litter and trash.
For example, electric wire insulation... I'm assuming this bacteria will go pretty slowly, not having a negative impact on all the disposable stuff we go through. However, there are lots of plastic uses that are expected to maintain their integrity for decades, in places that can't/won't be checked or replaced.
either A) convert back to plastics (not sure how) or B) http://science.sciencemag.org/... ---> ethyl glycol ---> *burn* ---> Carbon Monoxide (a down hill raction) --->https://www.anl.gov/articles/new-leaf-scientists-turn-carbon-dioxide-back-fuel --- > methenol ---> burn in cars
When my son was a baby, we tried some biodegradable diapers. Unfortunately, the baby wet them at night and they started biodegrading before we changed them in the morning. Somewhat messy.
Sorry, not sorry for exploiting low hanging fruit.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
I assume you mean expanded polystyrene aka styrofoam... toss it all in a vat of acetone to disolve then reuse it.
This appears to be a wildly disproportionate response to someone posting a few Amazon affiliate links or is there some huge back story I've missed, a spurned lover, perhaps?
Didn't The Andromeda Strain have something similar?
“What we are hoping to do is use this enzyme to turn this plastic back into its original components, so we can literally recycle it back to plastic,” said McGeehan
That's currently a wish. What are the current byproducts, are they toxic and can they be economically reprocessed into something? The key word here is "economically". It it costs less, then any downside with health or environmental issues take a backseat.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
I for one would like to welcome our plastic munching Enzyme accidental Overlords. What could possibly go wrong?
âoeA full life-cycle assessment would be needed to ensure the technology does not solve one environmental problem â" waste â" at the expense of others, including additional greenhouse gas emissions.â
That sounds important. Also no zombies caused by extremely resilient mutant enzymes sounds great :)
I'm probably much older than the usual denizens of this site and I remember the detergent scare of the 1950's. Basically detergents (Tide was the number one brand) contaminated local streams and rivers and did not readily decompose. A few years later Tide changed its formula and the problem disappeared. The bottom line is that problems caused by technology have technological fixes.
I remember when a novel solution to excess Tide was popularized on the Internet a few weeks ago. It has the wonderful side-effect of population control by self-(de)-selection!
(Here I am assuming that the Tide Pod Challenge is not at the root of the "accidental" creation of mutant plastic-munching Enzyme Overlords...)
Better than fire?
That's because the tidal range is huge in that area. The reason plastics break down so quickly is due to abrasion with the boats, moorings, sand, etc, which is exacerbated by the strong tidal flows. We're taking about the plastics breaking down naturally which - as demonstrated by photos of seas full of plastic - *is* slow.
Unless you're suggesting that we dump all our plastic waste in the English channel. It won't affect me as I live near the furthest point from the coast. /s
So what waste products are created by the enzyme? Is the waste easily dealt with or have any value as a product of the reaction?
The linked article says nothing about biodegradation. Biodegradation means that a material breaks down into things like CO2, water and minerals. In this case the plastics decompose into styrene trimer and bisphenol-A, these are nasty pollutants known to harm reproduction and cause cancer. So no, plastics do not biodegrade in the sea, and yes, I'd definitely prefer using these enzymes to recycle these plastics rather than dumping them in landfills and oceans.
Webster's defines biodegradable as "capable of being broken down especially into innocuous products by the action of living things (such as microorganisms)". The product of plastics decomposing in the sea is definitely not innocuous (harmless), and the National Geographic article says nothing about how the plastics decompose in the ocean (bacteria? corrosion by the salt water?) so neither of us can be sure that it fits either the Webster's or the Wikipedia definition. In any case calling this breakdown of plastics into poisonous chemicals "biodegradation" is quite a stretch.
There are no specific requirements on the output of biodegredation.
Actually there are. The Wikipedia article you linked quotes the EU definition of biodegradation, which requires "the conversion of >90% of the original material into CO2, water and minerals by biological processes within 6 months". Bisphenol-A ain't no mineral.
http://www.newser.com/story/19... http://www.newser.com/story/24... http://www.newser.com/story/20... http://www.newser.com/story/23... http://www.newser.com/story/21... http://www.newser.com/story/23... http://www.onegreenplanet.org/... Watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Then sign this petition: https://www.thepetitionsite.co...
Is there a way to use this to deal with microplastics? Bottles are easy since they're all in one place, but the micro stuff is all over the environment.
J