PET is a clear plastic used in clothing, plastic bottles and food packaging.
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Next they screened the microbes living on the samples to see whether any of them were eating the PET and using it to grow. A strain of plastic-eating germs could reduce pollution, according to a team of Japanese scientists. Plastic is not the only carbon-based polymer in the world.
The team at Kyoto University also managed to identify the gene in the bacteria’s DNA responsible for the plastic-decomposing enzymes, using that knowledge to generate new enzymes that successfully broke down PET in the laboratory.
Most plastic degrades extraordinarily slowly, but PET – short for polyethylene terephthalate – is especially durable, and about 61 million tons of the colorless plastic was produced worldwide in 2013 alone, according to the researchers. After adhering to the PET surface, the bacteria secretes one enzyme onto the PET to generate an intermediate chemical. It appeared that many organisms were breaking the plastic down, but further scrutiny proved that only one type of bacteria was eating away at the plastic. The process will require the temperature to be continuously maintained at a level of 86 degrees Fahrenheit. Even though this bacteria discovery is said to be an enormous breakthrough, some scientists are unsure if it will really make a difference.
“If you walk down the aisle in Wal-Mart you’re seeing a lot of PET”, said Tracy Mincer, who studies plastics in the ocean at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in MA. Mincer commented about the new bacteria discovery. “Environmentally, I would prefer recycling if it can be optimized and improved”, he says. It’s likely that there are other microbes out there doing the same thing for PET and other kinds of plastics – and one of those species could wind up revolutionizing the way we recycle.
“This process could be quite common”, he said.
Plastic pollution is on the rise, especially in the oceans. With more research, scientists believe ideonella sakaiensis may have the ability to be engineered for use in landfills.
We’ve all heard of bacteria that thrive in the most unlikely places on the planet making a meal out of the most unbelievable materials, including nuclear waste and oil.
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“The bacterium is the first strain having a potential to degrade PET completely into carbon dioxide and water”, Kohei Oda, an applied microbiologist at the Kyoto Institute of Technology in Japan and co-author of the study, told CBS News.
