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Earth has a plastics problem, and not many great options to solve it. Plastic is everywhere: food, toiletries, and cleaning products come encased in it; our toothbrushes and children’s toys and disposable coffee lids are made of it; and we carry groceries and dispose of trash in bags of it. It’s impossible to avoid. Yet we don’t often think about the fact that these items will still be around hundreds of years from now.
That’s right—your last toothbrush, the one you threw out a couple months ago and never thought of again, will still be slowly decomposing in a landfill in 100 years. Apply that same thought to all the plastic in your home, then all the plastic in the world, and… it’s a lot.
Part of why plastic is so useful is because it’s durable. The flip side is, it’s really hard to get rid of. A team of scientists from the University of Texas at Austin are working on a tool that might be able to help: an enzyme that can break down plastics in just a week—that is, plastics that would otherwise take centuries to fully degrade.
Polyethylene terephthalate, which thankfully is more widely known as PET, is a clear, strong, lightweight plastic; it’s also the chemical name for polyester. PET is most commonly used in food and beverage packaging (it was definitely in the last disposable bottle of water you drank). As such, this type of plastic accounts for 12 percent of all the plastic waste in the world, according to the paper the UT team published last week in Nature.
“One thing we can do is we can break this down into its initial monomers,” Hal Alper, an author on the paper, told Motherboard. “And that’s what the enzyme does. And then once you have your original monomer, it’s as if you’re making fresh plastic from scratch, with the benefit that you don’t need to use additional petroleum resources.”
singularityhub.com
That’s right—your last toothbrush, the one you threw out a couple months ago and never thought of again, will still be slowly decomposing in a landfill in 100 years. Apply that same thought to all the plastic in your home, then all the plastic in the world, and… it’s a lot.
Part of why plastic is so useful is because it’s durable. The flip side is, it’s really hard to get rid of. A team of scientists from the University of Texas at Austin are working on a tool that might be able to help: an enzyme that can break down plastics in just a week—that is, plastics that would otherwise take centuries to fully degrade.
Polyethylene terephthalate, which thankfully is more widely known as PET, is a clear, strong, lightweight plastic; it’s also the chemical name for polyester. PET is most commonly used in food and beverage packaging (it was definitely in the last disposable bottle of water you drank). As such, this type of plastic accounts for 12 percent of all the plastic waste in the world, according to the paper the UT team published last week in Nature.
“One thing we can do is we can break this down into its initial monomers,” Hal Alper, an author on the paper, told Motherboard. “And that’s what the enzyme does. And then once you have your original monomer, it’s as if you’re making fresh plastic from scratch, with the benefit that you don’t need to use additional petroleum resources.”
Scientists Used AI to Create an Enzyme That Breaks Down Plastic in a Week Instead of a Century
The enzyme was able to break down 51 different varieties of plastic in non-specific temperature and pH conditions, and in less than 8 days.
singularityhub.com
