We are just getting started’: the plastic-eating bacteria that could change the world

Who knows what its consequences are? How about a simpler approach, like reducing plastic use maybe instead of some pie in the sky project?

I've been hearing about plastic eating bacteria for literal decades now. As far as I am concerned this is another Big Oil psyop to distract people from finally banning single use plastics.

Will they attempt to eat us as well since we now have plastics within our body?

This bacteria eats only one type of plastic (PET), and that's a minority of the plastic we produce

Related, half of the plastic pollution in the oceans is fishing nets; want less plastic in the environment, stopping fishing would be a better first step (and is required for many other reasons anyway)

It will immediately start eating all the plastic that we are still using causing untold damage. Believe me. When I mentioned this before some techbro smuggly suggested that the scientists would just invent some sort of plastic that they couldn't eat. Thus setting is back to where we started.

We can store them in secure plastic tanks; they will never escape into the wild.

Let's hope a strain mutates unexpectedly and turns into such an agressive plastic decomposer, it sends us back into the age of reusable containers for every thing.

As polyethylene is just carbon and hydrogen, could microbes that are powered by hydrogen produce something useful like carbon nanotubes or graphene?

tldr summary.

In 2001, Japanese scientists discovered a type of bacteria that could break down plastic bottles. This bacteria, named Ideonella sakaiensis, produces an enzyme that allows it to break down polyethylene terephthalate (PET), the most common plastic found in clothing and packaging[1]. Since then, researchers have been working on enhancing the bacteria's plastic-degrading abilities to help address the global plastic waste crisis.

Carbios, a French company, has developed a process that uses a bacterial enzyme to break down PET plastic waste into its precursor molecules, which can then be made into new plastic. This process has the potential to make plastic recycling more efficient and bring it closer to being infinitely recyclable like glass or aluminum[1]. Carbios currently processes about 250 kg of PET plastic waste daily and plans to open a larger facility in 2025 with the capacity to recycle over 130 tonnes per day[1].

However, this technology is not a complete solution to the plastic waste problem, as it still produces plastic and uses energy. Moreover, it does not address the vast amount of plastic waste already present in the environment. Researchers are exploring the potential of using microbes and enzymes to turn plastic into fully biodegradable materials, but more work is needed to develop such solutions[1].

If we can somewhat control it, good. Else, the last thing I want is the bacteria going at my PVC pipes and one day the ceiling under the toilet just burst out with a surprise.

Isn't this the exact premise of Stray?

compost for plastics does sound pretty interesting

this sounds like the premise of a dystopian novel

Either way, were gonna have to deal with the problem of these new bacteria possibly getting into non garbage, such as currently in use consumer electronics, and the eventual push by some companies trying to create "bacteria resistant" plastics, which I'm against, or the eventual knowledge that you shouldn't leave your phone sitting in certain areas or let it hit lake waters or other areas with high bacteria populations, kind of like wood and keeping an eye out for termites.

Just a thought of what may come, but for the current issues we face, this is still fantastic news

This is the best summary I could come up with:

When any living organism wishes to break down a larger compound – whether a string of DNA, or a complex sugar, or plastic – they turn to enzymes, tiny molecular machines within a cell, specialised for that task.

Enzymes work by helping chemical reactions happen at a microscopic scale, sometimes forcing reactive atoms closer together to bind them, or twisting complex molecules at specific points to make them weaker and more likely to break apart.

For most of the roughly 200 years we have been seriously studying them, microbes were in a sort of scientific jail: mainly assumed to be pathogens in need of eradication, or simple workhorses for a few basic industrial processes, such as fermenting wine or cheese.

About 25 years ago, the consensus among scientists was that there were probably fewer than ten million species of microbes on the planet; in the past decade, some new studies have put the number as high as a trillion, the vast majority still unknown.

A recent critical review in the journal Nature noted that many kinds of plastics would probably never be efficiently enzymatically digested, because of the comparatively huge amount of energy required to break their chemical bonds.

“There is not exactly a market incentive to clean up our waste, whether it’s CO2, or plastic,” says Victor di Lorenzo, a scientist at the Spanish National Biotechnology Centre in Madrid, and an evangelist for the large-scale application of microbes to solve humanity’s problems.

The original article contains 4,850 words, the summary contains 243 words. Saved 95%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

What do you folks think, unleash it on every dump on earth? Or cultivate it in pseudo-recycling centers?

@Bebo hopefully a future solution. But there are so many "hopefully future solutions" to so many big problems, and in the meantime we're not doing what we need to be doing right now. If we can't scale this up massively and unleash it on the oceans, is it helping much? Or is it just giving technology optimists a clean conscience?