Nature Is Fighting Back Against Plastic

[00:00:00]So, it's pretty indisputable that plastic is one of humanity's greatest inventions. It's lightweight, durable, and cheap. So good at being plastic that now we're desperately trying to figure out how to get rid of it.

[00:00:12]We've made more than 9 billion tons of the stuff, and much of it is still with us in landfills, in rivers, in the oceans, and somewhat alarmingly inside us.

[00:00:21]Scientists have found tiny pieces of plastic in human blood, lungs, brains, and even placentas, which is not exactly where the recycling bin is supposed to be.

[00:00:30]But nature may have a plan, because somewhere, quite literally in the dirt, microbes have started fighting back.

[00:00:36]A few years ago, scientists discovered a bacterium that could do something remarkable. It could eat plastic. Not sit on it, not grow around it, but actually digest it.

[00:00:44]The microbe produces a special enzyme that chops plastic bottles into smaller molecules that it can use as food.

[00:00:50]Now, before you imagine giant blobs of bacteria roaming the streets eating traffic cones, we're not quite there yet.

[00:00:55]The original microbe was painfully slow.

[00:00:58]At the rate it worked, it wasn't about to solve the worst plastic problem anytime soon.

[00:01:03]But that's where biotech enters the story.

[00:01:05]Scientists have taken these natural plastic-eating enzymes and started improving them using techniques such as protein engineering, directed evolution, and increasingly artificial intelligence. In other words, we're giving evolution a helping hand. The result? Some of the latest engineered enzymes can break down plastics in hours or days rather than centuries. Let me say that again. We've gone from materials designed to last hundreds of years to biological tools that can potentially dismantle them in a weekend.

[00:01:31]That's an astonishing shift. And it gets even better. Traditional recycling often downgrades plastic.

[00:01:37]A drinks bottle becomes carpet fiber, then the carpet fiber becomes something else, and eventually it ends up as waste.

[00:01:43]But enzyme recycling potentially breaks down plastic in all the way back to its original building blocks, allowing it to be turned into brand new plastic again with the same quality and performance over and over.

[00:01:54]It's more like infinite recycling. Now, there are still plenty of challenges.

[00:01:58]Scaling the technology, making it economical, making sure it works on the huge variety of plastics we use everyday.

[00:02:05]And no, we're not about to release genetically engineered bacteria into the oceans and hope for the best. That'd make for a very exciting movie and a very bad idea. What fascinates me most is that plastic has only really existed for about half a century, which is a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms.

[00:02:19]Yet, nature's already found a way to start fighting back against it.

[00:02:23]Life is adapting to one of humanity's greatest but newest inventions, which means that solution to our plastic problem might not come from a bigger machine or a better landfill or another recycling campaign. Might come from some of the smallest living things on Earth, microbes, the original recyclers.