New discovery: plastic eating bacterial to help clean up our environment

Plastic eating bacteria
discovered a strain of bacteria that can eat plastic, a
finding that might help solve the world’s fast-
growing plastic pollution problem.
The fear of having more plastic in the ocean than
fishes seem to have been averted with this discovery
by a team at Kyoto University who found the plastic
munching microbe, by rummaging around in piles of
waste.
After five years of searching through 250 samples,
they isolated a bacteria that could live on poly
(ethylene terephthalate) (PET), the type often used to
package bottled drinks, cosmetics and household
cleaners. They named the new species of bacteria
Ideonella sakaiensis.
This could be really good news for the environment.
Almost a third of all plastic packaging escapes
collection systems and ends up in nature or in
clogging up infrastructure, the World Economic
Forum (WEF) warned. Their report based on analysis
of 20 studies and interviews with 180 experts, said
only 14% of plastic packaging is collected for
recycling and that there will be more plastic than fish
calculated by weight in the world’s oceans by 2050.
How Ideonella Sakaiensis Consumes Plastic
Bottles
According to descriptions on Science Alert, the first
discovery of plastic bottle eating bacteria was of
tricky-to-cultivate fungi, whereas, in this case the
microbe is easily grown.
The researchers more or less left the PET in a warm
jar with the bacterial culture and some other
nutrients, and a few weeks later all the plastic was
gone.
Then came the real innovation, where the team
identified the enzymes that Ideonella sakaiensis uses
to breakdown the PET. All living things contain
enzymes that they use to speed up necessary
chemical reactions. Some enzymes help digest our
food, dismantling it into useful building blocks.
Without the necessary enzymes the body can’t
access certain sources of food. Ideonella sakaiensis
seems to have evolved an efficient enzyme that the
bacteria produces when it is in an environment that
is rich in PET.
The Kyoto researchers identified the gene in the
bacteria’s DNA that is responsible for the PET-
digesting enzyme. They then were able to
manufacture more of the enzyme and then
demonstrate that PET could be broken down with the
enzyme alone.
The Bacteria’s Benefits To Plastic Bottles
Recycling
This opens a whole new approach to plastic
recycling and decontamination since most plastic
bottles are not truly recycled presently. Instead they
are melted and reformed into other hard plastic
products. Packaging companies typically
prefer freshly made ‘virgin’ plastics that are created
from chemical starting materials that are usually
derived from oil. Now the PET-digesting enzymes
could be added to vats of waste, breaking all the
bottles or other plastic items down into easy-to-
handle chemicals. These could then be used to make
fresh plastics, producing a true recycling system.