Researchers Reveal Enzyme Cocktail That Speeds Up Degradation of Plastic

Researchers have recently revealed a new enzyme cocktail combination that can degrade plastic much faster. According to American and British researchers, it is a significant step towards completely recycling plastic wastes.

A New Way of Recycling Plastic

This cocktail may be a step towards the right direction in discovering a new kind of plastic recycling, which is much faster, cheaper, and applicable at a larger scale compared to present recycling methods.

According to the study authors, it is a "super-enzyme" that also creates plastic raw material for manufacturing new plastic products. It has the potential to repurpose plastics more easily.

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Exciting New Development

According to the University of Washington chemistry professor Jim Pfaendtner, it is an exciting new development for plastic recycling and the environmental movement.

The NOAA or National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration say that plastic is produced worldwide at an approximate volume of 359 million tons per year. From these, a minimum of 150 million tons are in landfills or littered into the environment.

Plastic has once been hailed as a revolutionary invention and has been valued for its durability. However, it could take 450 years for it to biodegrade in our oceans, if at all.

The Problem with Plastic

The majority of plastic wastes break down and become tiny shards called microplastics. These fragments are found inside marine organisms, on seawater, and even in human intestines.

Scientists have scrambled for solutions for years, including the creation of biodegradable plastic. Meanwhile, gas and oil companies are manufacturing more and more plastics. The most popular of these plastics is PET, which makes soda bottles, packaging, and synthetic clothing.

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The New Study

The new research was published last Monday in PNAS by a research team from various US institutions, such as the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the University of Portsmouth. The research combined two enzymes derived from a species of bacteria discovered in 2016 by Japanese scientists. The scientists found that the bacterium breaks down PET.

By 2018, the research team already successfully used one of the enzymes to break down plastic. However, when they added the second enzyme, the breakdown process was six times faster.

Study co-leader and Center for Enzyme Innovation director and professor John McGeehan said that the breaking down process brought back the plastic's original building blocks. These, he says, can be reused.

Other Research Efforts

To find efficient ways to break down plastics, French bio-industrial company Carbios and Toulouse National Institute of Sciences found another enzyme that degraded PET in as little as 10 hours. Carbios chief scientific officer Alain Marty said that the process was efficient enough to recycle PET "infinitely," and that it is already undergoing industrial-level pilot stage testing.

McGeehan's research team's process is much slower, taking days to weeks to recycle a single plastic bottle. To make the process faster, they are currently looking at pre-softening plastics and researching various alternatives to speed up the degradation to hours.

Persistent Logistics Problem

However, the primary obstacles to recycling remain: getting the plastics to the recycling plants, managing waste responsibly, and recovering plastics in the ocean.

Still, the team's new enzyme cocktail is a big step forward in efficiently degrading plastic.

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