Will we finally be able to really recycle plastics?

There has been a lot of drama around plastic in the water, in the food and everywhere else, including you. For a long time recycling was seen as the solution, but even today that does not really work, for multiple reasons.

But maybe – just maybe – scientists are finally on the road for a real recycling.

Two years ago a bacterium was found on a Japanese waste dumb that was able to enzymatically dissolve PET, one of the most often used type of plastic.

Enzymes are used in a variety of industry processes, enabling reactions that would be impossible or extremely expensive with other methods.
But often the problem lays not in the ability of the enzyme but the speed or the conditions needed.

In the case of the PET enzyme the scientists accidentally, while researching it, changed it to a more effective version. That means that the enzyme is likely not “perfected” by the bacteria and can be improved further by a lot.

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.

“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. “It means we won’t need to dig up any more oil and, fundamentally, it should reduce the amount of plastic in the environment.”

But however exiting this discovery may be, it is still years, if not decades, away from any large scale usage. Plastic waste is still a huge problem, both coming (oil) and going (waste). Please be a responsible human and only use plastic if necessary.

(If you are interested in the structure of enzymes and how enzymes and other proteins fold and work, you may want to play a bit with fold.it. You may even find your name in a scientific paper.)