Mumbai may have just banned plastics in order to do a little to save the environment, but scientists in the US and UK may have just figured out a way to actually reverse the damage that¡¯s already been caused.?
And they¡¯ve done it completely by accident.
A team comprised of scientists from the University of Portsmouth in the UK and National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado have created an enzyme that can break down plastic bottles, allowing us to potentially solve the global plastic pollution problem for good by fully recycling plastics.
This new research is the product of a discovery back in 2016, when researchers from Japan¡¯s Kyoto University made a strange discovery. They found a bacterium at a local waste dump that had evolved to eat plastic, the first time such a thing has ever been seen. They eventually released the detailed structure of the enzyme that allowed the bacterium to do this, which the international team of researchers attempted to mutate to see how it had evolved. What they instead ended up doing was accidentally make the enzyme much more efficient at breaking down PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic, the kind used to make fizzy drink bottles.?
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¡°What actually turned out was we improved the enzyme, which was a bit of a shock,¡± said Prof John McGeehan, research leader at the University of Portsmouth, UK. ¡°It¡¯s great and a real finding.¡± The new and improved enzyme takes just days to begin breaking down the plastic, compared to the centuries it takes to otherwise break down in our oceans. And yet, the research team believes it can be modified to speed up the process even further. With some tweaking, we may eventually eventually even be using these bacteria on a large scale to clean up plastic at dump sites and in our oceans.
¡°What we are hoping to do is use this enzyme to turn this plastic back into its original components, so we can literally recycle it back to plastic,¡± McGeehan says. ¡°It means we won¡¯t need to dig up any more oil and, fundamentally, it should reduce the amount of plastic in the environment.¡±
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