Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/04/09/scientists-enzyme-eats-plasti.html
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Like Pringles you say. I have total faith they will keep it contained to the recycling centers, and no way will be found for it to be weaponized.
Also, it immediately made me think of this for some reason:
eta:
gobbling
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Scientists: enzyme eats plastic like it’s made of Pringles
They made an enzyme that can feel shame?
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Like others here, I worry about the long term effects of introducing a new mutant bacteria on our world.
Hey, maybe it’ll be fine, maybe it’ll save our asses with regards to plastic pollution, but I also can’t help thinking there are no easy solutions, every solution introduces another tangential problem.
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As a matter of fact, this must be at least the fifth time that I read about a bacteria that adapted to eat plastics. There was even a schoolboy in the news a couple of years ago that discovered some. There is a whole micro-ecosystem forming on plastic bits in the ocean right now.
What seems to be different about Carbios is that they are using it as a tool to recycle plastic, so it now can generate $$$$$ instead of just solving plastic pollution. Time will tell if it’s profitable enough to scale.
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First, I think this is great and they’re doing way more to fix the problem than I am. Second, this needs a sense of scale.
The researchers broke down 16.7 g of PET per liter solution per hour. To scale up to the ~200 million tons of plastic waste currently *added annually to the world that does not scale well. Breaking down 200 million tons with this method would take 10 years of processing in 30 million gallons of solution containing 600 thousand tons of enzyme. And that is only after all the plastic has been manually collected and broken down into a fine powder to have enough surface area for the enzyme to bind.
Yes this is cool work, but if we actually want to address the problem it won’t be done through recycling. It needs to start with a massive reduction in plastic production and ending single use plastics (if the bottles can’t be refilled and reused then they shouldn’t get made). And all serious plans will require a massive effort to physically collect the millions of tons of plastics currently in the ocean. Ultimately, people are promoting this sort of cool research to avoid talking about the hard, expensive necessities involved in really adressing the problem
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A mutant bacterial enzyme that breaks down plastic bottles for recycling in hours has been created by scientists.
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Andromeda Strain was the first pandemic movie I (re)watched after the pandemic started, and I was pleased by how well it has held up.
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Recently I heard a story on a public radio program, I forget which one, about how the petro/plastic industry intentionally overhyped how recyclable plastic is, and how they’re getting ready to repeat the process.
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If only we could get such a sudden happy ending to our situation, eh?
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OK, except for that part, but Contagion had a similarly unlikely ending.
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I re-watched that last night. Polycrone gaskets, huh.
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If only Hollywood wasn’t on lockdown, I’m sure they could ride to our rescue; though a Writers’ Strike could spell the end of us all.
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I heard the story too. It was in conjunction with a Frontline series called Plastic Wars IIRC.
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So what’s the end result of the enzyme eating the plastic?
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Polymer building blocks, ready to be polymerized into new plastics.
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