Engineers Create an Enzyme That Breaks Down Plastic Waste in Hours, Not Decades

Scientists are working hard to find ways to use plastic without causing long-term damage to the environment around us, as there is a worryingly large amount of plastic pollution.

A new study shows the use of a specially created variant of an enzyme that can be used to break down the components of plastic.

The team that developed the variant says it could be used to clean up sites contaminated by plastic pollution.

In tests,PET products were broken down in a week and some took 24 hours to degrade in natural conditions.

Hal Alper is a chemical engineer from the University of Texas at Austin.

Beyond the obvious waste management industry, this also provides corporations from every sector the opportunity to take a lead in recycling their products.

The FAST-PETase is a functional, active, stable, and tolerant PETase. They used machine learning to find five different changes that would allow them to degrade the plastic faster under different environmental conditions.

The researchers showed they could put the plastic back together again using chemical processes after the enzyme variant cut the plastic down.

The study of 51 different post-consumer plastic containers, five different polyester fibers, and fabrics and water bottles made from PET was used to find FAST-PET.

The effectiveness of the variant was proved in tests at temperatures less than 50 degrees Celsius.

The tech has a huge advantage in the future because of the requirement to work in the environment at ambient temperature.

There are a lot of consumer packaging that is made of PET. It is thought to make up around 12 percent of all global waste. Less than 10 percent of all plastic has been recycled.

The introduction of FAST-PETase could help. It is cheap, portable, and not too difficult to scale up to the sort of industrial levels that would be required, according to the researchers.

Plastic can be thrown in a landfill where it will rot at a very slow rate, use up a lot of energy, and fill the atmosphere with noxious gas. It is clear that alternative strategies are desperately needed, and this could be one of them.

This work really demonstrates the power of bringing together different disciplines, from synthetic biology to chemical engineering to artificial intelligence, says biochemist Andrew Ellington from the University of Texas at Austin.

The research has been published.