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Plastic-eating enzyme could eliminate billions of tons of landfill waste
- zrail 4y agoI remember reading about this in middle school. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/86452.Ill_Wind https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/86452.Ill_Wind
- SURA 4y agoAfter it kills plastic, how do we kill it
- andai 4y agohttps://youtube.com/watch?v=P9yruQM1ggc https://youtube.com/watch?v=P9yruQM1ggc
- unnamed76ri 4y agoI read this sci-fi book years ago. It didn’t end well.
- sudden_dystopia 4y agoNeat. Hope it can scale and soon!
- ars 4y agoEven smarter would be to take that plastic and burn it for energy, instead of giving that energy to an enzyme, that will just make waste heat. After reading the article instead of the headline: They imply they can turn the plastic back into a monomer and then rebuild it as a new polymer. Maybe that would work, but I have huge doubts - a monomer is very chemically active, and it really wants to polymerize. That enzyme may work in a lab, but I doubt they can turn it into an industrial process. I take issue with this: "The most common method for disposing of plastic, besides throwing it in a landfill, is to burn it, which is costly, energy intensive and spews noxious gas into the air." This is utterly false, and I don't see how they can claim to be scientific if they publish falsehoods. It makes me wonder about the accuracy of the rest of the press release.
- r00fus 4y agoIsn't the problem with plastic burning the fact that most plastic waste is actually contaminated with food/non-plastics that burn differently?
- williamtwild 4y agoYes. I see quite a few three letter accounts advocating for burning plastic. Let them throw some in their fireplace of the chimnea while relaxing with the family and see how that goes.
- ars 4y agoPET burns very clean with enough air. I use it as a fire starter for outdoor fires. A fireplace is a smoky thing, without enough air (even the wood makes a lot of smoke). An incinerator makes sure to supply enough air.
- SoftTalker 4y agoIndustrial waste incineration is not at all the same thing as burning trash in a backyard fire.
- toast0 4y agoI recall throwing some plastic bottlecaps in fireplaces during my youth. IIRC, they'd get melty, then the puddle would ignite and burn very hot, until it was spent, and that would be about it. Might have smelled funny, but I can't remember that far back; was less sooty than the wood at least. Of course, water bottle caps aren't likely to have food waste or much of anything else other than the plastic, maybe a smidge of water and some fingeroils from handling. I also didn't have a gas spectrometer or anything, and the fireplace wasn't an industrial furnace with process controls and what not. On the topic of food waste, my time in the kitchen says most foods will burn just fine. Although, they often leave residues that I could see being problematic when they build up. As with everything, you'd need specifics to determine the right tradeoffs. It would seem to me there's potential in reducing the transport distance and land use of solid waste, and also reducing extraction, transport, and burning of some fossil fuels, if a burn the trash for electricity program works. But specifics matter, of course.
- hprotagonist 4y agoSo, uh, what are the CO2 emissions like on eating that much sequestered carbon?
- bobbylarrybobby 4y agoWhat would be really cool is if we got something that could eat plastic and produce as a waste product some environmentally neutral substance like (say) some kind of alcohol. Is there anything like that on the horizon?
- ars 4y agoPlease define environmentally neutral. Because alcohol will just oxidize into water and CO2. Do you want to just sequester the Carbon? Something very environmentally neutral would be .... plastic. Anything biodegradable would eventually become CO2 and water. Best option is to burn it and capture the energy for a useful purpose, instead of letting that energy be wasted when it biodegrades.
- paulryanrogers 4y agoCan plastic combustion be done with releasing CO2 into the atmosphere? Or worse chemicals?
- motohagiography 4y agoOr rather, how will governments and NGOs manage the problem (and by extension, the economy) if someone invents a technology that actually just solves it?
- nikanj 4y agoI’ve read this headline monthly since the 90s.
- icefox11 4y agoYou happen to read anything related to removing salt from seawater as well?
- tda 4y agoPlastic waste should be burned for heat and/or electricity in an incinerator. Every other usage/disposal method seems like a waste to me. Instead of burning fossil fuels directly, we get much more value from them if we first turn it into some plastic product, and only then burn it. And as long as we keep burning fossil fuels for heat and power, let's not wate out attention on recycling (downcycling actually) plastics as we can much better burn the old and make fresh new plastic from the fossil fuels we didn't have to burn because of that. When we are not relying on fossil fuels anymore for heat and power (which is hopefully sooner than later), only then we need to start looking into plastic recycling
- mistrial9 4y agothis is widely promoted (incinerator to energy) and widely disliked (state of the air in industrial locations around the world) .. not a new idea
- tda 4y agoI think just about all household trash in the Netherlands is incinerated. And as far as I know the exhoust fumes are manageable, but definitely not something to live next to. Just like any other fossil fuel run powerplant by the way.
- r00fus 4y agoDoesn't burning plastic produce large amounts of toxic off gassing?
- williamtwild 4y agoYes , it does. Burning plastic without somehow accounting for that is a terrible idea.
- MetaWhirledPeas 4y agoIs there a way to mitigate this, or make use of the waste gasses?
- powerbroker 4y agoI understand that the pits, that are the foundation of landfills, are lined with impermeable plastic sheets. Their purpose is to avoid ground-water contamination. So, there may be some redesign of landfills required before this technology can succeed.
- abcc8 4y agoI was thinking the same. Worst case scenario with a solution like this one is that these organisms get into the wild, gain more mutations, and then rapidly release a large volume of carbon, currently sequestered as plastic, into the atmosphere. Or, plastic-tropic organisms used as a weapon, sprayed over cities, etc.
- CameronNemo 4y agoPerhaps plastic should start being compressed into bricks for long term storage that does not lead to leaching.
- faitswulff 4y agoNote: the article talks about an enzyme, which is a simple protein. They might manufacture it via organic means, but the enzyme by itself has no capacity to reproduce or mutate.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- abcc8 4y agoThat is true, but the best and easiest way to make a huge mass of a specific enzyme is to grow it in something, either bacteria or yeast. If it is in an organism, the organism can escape into the wild.
- faitswulff 4y agoThat's a much smaller threat than if the organism itself were to be applied directly to plastics. Designer organisms aren't generally well-suited to spreading in the wild and even if they were, they could be engineered to require a certain dependency that they would die without. But yes, still theoretically it's possible.
- scohesc 4y agoI wonder what the potential harm to infrastructure would be if this bacteria were to escape landfills / remediation sites and happen to get into places where PET is used in something important. Not that I'm against finding ways to _actually_ recycle or break-down plastics, just it seems like something we need a microscope to see might be hard to keep track of.
- northisup 4y agowhat are the biproducts?
- Animats 4y agoThat's the real question. It doesn't "eliminate" anything. It turns it into - what? Organic sludge? Is that useful for something? Plastic bottle recycling into new plastic pellets works quite well. Southern California has a huge plant doing it. Non-bottle plastic is more of a problem but less of the volume.
- lstodd 4y agoNothing eliminates anything. It's all CxHy + zO2 -> nCO2 + mH2O There is such thing called second law of thermodynamics. The only question is into how much stages we can split this process, and how much useful stuff we can extract from each of those.
- rootusrootus 4y agoCan't help but wonder if this is a solution searching for a problem. Landfills already have protections against leeching into the surrounding environment. And we aren't going to plausibly run out of space for landfills in the foreseeable future (images from Wall-E notwithstanding). Isn't plastic basically inert once it gets to a landfill anyway? Even if it takes centuries to break down, who cares? IMO we'd be better off focusing research on reducing the waste rather than improving disposal.
- faitswulff 4y agoThis could theoretically treat free-floating microplastics in, e.g., the ocean, which you can't plausibly isolate in landfills.
- rootusrootus 4y agoCorrect me if I'm wrong, but doesn't this process still assume that the plastic is collected and heated (not super hot, the claim seems to be "less than 50C")? In the case of the ocean, it doesn't seem like this technology would be useful until after we collect all the little bits of plastic. And at that point we could just put it in a landfill anyway.
- faitswulff 4y agoYeah, good point. Theoretically, a more optimized enzyme might be able to do it at ambient temperatures, which they mention in the article as a target. Assuming the search space for enzyme mutations isn't already exhausted.
- nomel 4y ago> a more optimized enzyme might be able to do it at ambient temperatures Releasing this into the ocean, in any appreciable amount, seems like a very bad idea. I think collection from plastic "hot spots", and then separate processing, would make more sense. I think it's best to reduce the number of foreign chemicals in the environment.
- not2b 4y agoDepends on what the waste products are and how they are captured, otherwise you trade one problem for another. The plastic takes up space but if it's in a landfill you have carbon capture, best not to release that carbon into the air as CH4 or CO2.
- BurningFrog 4y agoYeah, landfills are not major environmental problems, AFAIK, but they offend the neat freak within all of us. And, as you say, they're pretty good carbon deposits, which is supposed to be The Most Important Thing.
- noja 4y ago> Yeah, landfills are not major environmental problems ... yet?
- xxr 4y agoIs there enough raw material on earth for landfills to become major environmental problems? (genuinely curious)
- BurningFrog 4y agoMaybe this makes me sounds like a jerk, but: All material that can end up in landfills is already on Earth.
- notahacker 4y agoDepends what you mean by "major environmental problem". Landfills aren't going to singlehandedly cause anthropogenic climate change, but they contribute significantly to it, and a poorly sealed landfill leaching its contents into the local water table can cause some pretty drastic problems with the local environment
- sacrosancty 4y ago
- superjan 4y agoThe press release points to the paper’s abstract. From that, it appears that it is specific to PET plastic. It can de-polymerase PET for later synthesis in new PET products. PET is already being recycled, the issue there is that recycled PET is not clean enough to reuse as food packaging. I hope this method does not suffer from this limitation.
- mistrial9 4y agohaving done some research on this topic, the problem is not what goes into the landfills.. the problems are in the plastics that do not make it into the landfills, the production of the plastics, and the over-dependence on single-use plastics since the era of the Bic-Pen
- noizejoy 4y agoThe phrase “single use” is doing some heavy lifting there, and I have no idea why that particular product is made to be patient zero for this. A pen presumably gets hundreds or thousands of uses, depending on how you count. For example, one way product packaging is much more of a single use plastic. That being said, I’d hate to lose plastics for bulk food packaging, unless there’s an equally food safe successor.
- d--b 4y agoHow much co2 does this release? Humanity needs to pick its battles carefully…
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bhouston 4y agoAnd then this escapes and starts to eat plastics in cars and other durable goods thus rendering increased near term maintenance costs across a large number of industries.... just a thought.
- 323 4y agoDumb question, but if plastic eating bacteria starts spreading, wouldn't we all be in a lot of trouble? Will car plastic interior start to rot? Will PET soda and water bottles start decomposing in the grocery store, and will they require refrigeration to prevent that? Will our computer keyboards require new materials?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ars 4y agoThis is for an enzyme, not bacteria, but to answer your question bacteria still need water, so if you keep the plastic dry it should be fine even in such a world. PET soda bottles will be sterilized, then sealed. The outside is dry and won't decompose. You won't be able to re-close it and leave it out though. For things that need to stay wet, like drain pipes, you would add chlorine and use PVC which is unlikely to be edible to bacteria.
- hackernewds 4y agoAfter COVID always worry about humans engineering some sort of biological net new specialized entity.
- kwhitefoot 4y agoSee Doomwatch - Plastic Eaters from 1970: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0564476/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0564476/
- esprehn 4y agoCheck out The Andromeda Strain (and movie): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Andromeda_Strain https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Andromeda_Strain
- intrasight 4y agoWho else things of "Grey Goo" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- FredPret 4y agoWe use plastic in many places with the idea that it’ll never rot. Obviously we want plastic to eventually biodegrade, but I wonder what sorts of chaos would be caused by it.
- Areading314 4y agoWouldn't this be extremely dangerous if a form of "plastic rot" was created? Things like PVC sewer pipes, or any long-lived plastic parts in cars/equipment could now degrade over time, which could create huge costs to find alternative materials. After all plastic is pretty useful because it is biologically and chemically inert.
- jimmySixDOF 4y agoDeepMind's AlphaFold capabilities to model protein-folding is going to accelerate this kind of discovery at a quantum leap order of magnitude. The featured article notes a custom CNN was used here - but AlphaFold is a game changer in synthetic biology in general even though the first goals were human medical application focused. BBC Science in Action [1] interviewed Prof John McGeehan of the Centre for Enzyme Innovation at Portsmouth University working on Bacteria breaking down Plastic in landfills. He explained his workflow of maybe selecting one candidate very carefully and occasionally out of many due to the cost/time involved & how DeepMind gave him more results in a single weekend (for free) than he had expected to see over his entire reasearch career. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3ct1l3y https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3ct1l3y
- aembleton 4y ago> quantum leap order of magnitude What does that mean?
- BLanen 4y agoI've been hearing this for 20 years. I assume nothing will happen while this "news" will be used by fossil fuel companies to virtue signal "technological progress" in the plastic problem.
- pcurve 4y agoyep.. this and regrowing tooth.
- OJFord 4y agoYes, I came across this recently and almost submitted, but it seemed like a minor development by the same team on news (discussed here) a couple of years ago, and searching around there was similarly titled stuff from mainstream news going back years. Seems to be one of those things where, if you're not in the field, all the news is the same and sounds like a breakthrough, but it'll be 20y out from actual adoption for a while.
- salt-thrower 4y agoAgreed. I generally assume that any headline with the structure "X new thing could solve Y," where Y is a massive problem that everyone wants a silver bullet for, is clickbait. I've seen too many of them at this point. Everyone wants a quick fix for climate change and pollution because it will absolve us of doing the hard work that the problem really requires. By all means, we should pursue such moonshot ideas - but like you said, it will be used to virtue signal some false idea of "progress" while the problem gets worse.
- hackernewds 4y agoThis is a bit of a cynical take, if a solution is 1% likely it seems natural that 99% of the time the solutions aren't viable. Implies the 1% is still possible.
- salt-thrower 4y agoCynicism is warranted for the reason that the other commenter pointed out: the fossil fuel industry (and by extension, any Big Industry) will use moonshot ideas like this as ammo for their PR machine. "Don't worry about our lobbying against viable solutions right now - soon we'll have this new silver bullet idea." That sort of thing. But it's definitely worth exploring those moonshot ideas, so I'm not shutting that idea down. It's just good to be aware of how these sorts of headlines are used in the service of greenwashing.
- lstodd 4y agoRead the Mutant 59 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2368220.Mutant_59 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2368220.Mutant_59
- stevespang 4y ago
- dimal 4y ago> Recycling is the most obvious way to cut down on plastic waste. I would think that the most obvious solution is to not use a material that lasts thousands of years for disposable packaging that’s only needed for a few months. Seems like these types of “revolutionary” new processes to make recycling finally work come out every year, and yet nothing changes. I can’t imagine this will be any different. As long as it’s cheaper to create new plastics than it is to recycle them, nothing will change.
- kingkawn 4y agoRegulation is the way
- micromacrofoot 4y agoyeah this seems like something on a scale that's worth regulating, if we stopped now we'd probably still be mitigating the effects 50 years from now
- michaelmrose 4y agoMake a disposable plastic container cost an extra dollar paid at time of manufacture. Double the cost every year. We will be 100% migrated by the end of 2023.
- staticassertion 4y agoCompanies will just pass the cost to the consumer, blame regulation, and keep using plastic because it's easier and there's nothing we can do to stop them.
- franga2000 4y agoI used to think like that too, but in many fields, there is a huge pressure against "passing it on" because of some producers that optimise price over everything else. If your only competitive advantage is being cheaper than the rest and now everyone is raising prices, doing the same will not only hurt your appearance as the "reliable value brand", but you'll be wasting a huge opportunity to grab a big new chunk of the market (customers tend to looks for alternatives when prices increase). These are the companies that will use alternative materials, even if they are inferior (e.g. paper straws and cups), because it's the cheaper option.
- ThrowITout4321 4y agoThis is BS "could" does not mean "will". We get these types of articles every so often but I've yet to see any of it come to anything. My suspicion is that this research gets amplified by PR firms that service the plastic industry with the idea that the public will feel better about all the plastic that is being thrown into the environment and landfills. Right now the only solution is to minimize plastic use as much as possible. Please keep this in mind.
- RajT88 4y agoIt is truly bonkers how much stuff comes wrapped in plastic (especially where paper would do just as good a job).
- userbinator 4y agoI very much hope none of it will "come to anything" --- if plastic-eating organisms start becoming widespread, and there is definitely plenty for them to feed on, we'll face a much bigger problem. with the idea that the public will feel better about all the plastic that is being thrown into the environment and landfills. Personally, I don't think it's anywhere as much of a problem as the environmentalists claim it is either. Much like the biomass from long ago which has become the oil of today, I'm pretty sure the plastic waste of today will simply become the oil of the future.
- lgessler 4y ago> Much like the biomass from long ago which has become the oil of today, I'm pretty sure the plastic waste of today will simply become the oil of the future. OK, but on that timescale virtually nothing about climate change or environmental issues matters. On the scale of millions of years, life on Earth will continue in some way or another. But what's important is how much suffering will be endured in the potentially cataclysmic coming 100 years, and plastics hold great potential for harm on that timescale.
- BariumBlue 4y agoEh, there's stuff that eats wood but we still build our houses out of it. Paper disintegrates pretty gosh darn easy if you leave it outside but we still use plenty of it. Most steel rusts in the right conditions, including the stuff in infrastructure. I don't think plastic eating bacteria would be as much of a problem as people make it out to be.
- lysozyme 4y agoIn terms of the enzyme engineering challenge, it turns out to have been pretty straightforward to improve upon the starting enzyme. The designed enzyme sequence >contains five mutations compared to wild-type [1] In this case, the enzyme used as the starting point for engineering turns out to need only a few small changes to improve its ability to efficiently depolymerize PET. Choosing which of those small changes to make is the aim of the machine learning algorithms the authors used. The authors provide a visualization of exactly where those changes are inside the protein on their website >Interactive visualizations of MutCompute for Fig. 1 are available at https://www.mutcompute.com/petase/5xjh https://www.mutcompute.com/petase/5xjh and https://www.mutcompute.com/petase/6ij6 https://www.mutcompute.com/petase/6ij6 1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04599-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04599-z
- moron4hire 4y agoSounds like they're building on the work in the 90s of Dr. Kio Marv with OILIX: https://metalgear.fandom.com/wiki/OILIX https://metalgear.fandom.com/wiki/OILIX
- shafkathullah 4y agoBeen hearing these news for some years now, what's still blocking it from going mainstream?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- vletal 4y agoGiven our history of creating solutions to problems and dealing with side-effects later, I'd love to first see plenty of research explaining how is this not gonna go out of hand in a few years.
- NonNefarious 4y agoWe're also still waiting for graphene to solve all of our problems. Oh, and why are we still waiting on this: https://phys.org/news/2010-02-spray-on-liquid-glass-revolutionize.html https://phys.org/news/2010-02-spray-on-liquid-glass-revoluti...
- Woansdei 4y agono idea why you're still waiting, it is available https://www.liquidglassnanotech.com/automotive-solutions/ https://www.liquidglassnanotech.com/automotive-solutions/
- fritztastic 4y agoThe US sends millions of tons of trash to China, India, and other places. Perhaps it would be better for places to implement local sorting (glass, plastic, paper, etc.) and composting- as many other nations do as opposed to disposing of all trash in the same containers and shipping the problem off for someone else to deal with. But even better would be to generate less trash in the first place or at least have an attempt at transitioning to using biodegradable packaging. Packaging, which also is excessive and unecessary in the first place, like items in layers of plastic casing, plastic boxes, plastic wrapping, and so on when there are ways of distributing goods without convenient prepackaging in favor of instead refilling reusable containers or utilizing materials such as fabric, glass, or others which can be repurposed and reused more flexibly and reliably than plastic. Not even going to get into plastics being contaminated by toxic things, leaching chemicals, microplastics, affecting acquatic life, a variety of other problems relating to plastics and excessive plastic waste. I really wish people would push to decrease the production and use of plastics in the first place, seems more sustainable than trying to engineer solutions at the tail end of the issue. Seems to me much more effective to curtail the source of the problem than to attempt to implement solutions later on although I do appreciate that some people see the issue and are working to do something about it.
- Cryptoclysm 4y agoIt's easy to reduce problems down to an exclusive-or choice, but in reality we need to use all our cards at the same time to look after our planet. Of course we should be reducing plastic waste, and at least where I live, I've seen a big push for the reduction of of single use plastics, both through legislation, savvy consumers and responsible supermarkets. While the biologists work on plastic-eating enzymes, product engineers can work on sustainable packaging, logistics specialists can work on low carbon distribution and politicians can work on ensuring economic motives align with a positive future for our planet. There is hope.
- wiz21c 4y agoDunno... In my country, you put your garbage in special bags on your front door once a week. They get collected. We have to sort our garbages: plastics and metals (mostly use to wrap food) in one bag, paper in another one, biological stuff (plants, unused parts of vegetables, etc) in another one and the rest in the yellow bag. Nice and cool (although I'm not sure how useful it is in the end). Now the funny thing is that you get to see other families' trash bags once a week on their front door and there are big differences. My family has a tiny yellow bag every week and a blue one every other week whereas many others (with comparable family sizes) have 2 yellows at least and 1 blue every single week. My guess is that they eat a lot of food coming from the supermarket: lots of wrapping, lots of cans, etc. It's an informed guess because the blue bags are transparent :-)
- NonNefarious 4y agoDon't we hear about one of these every five years or so?
- Gordonjcp 4y agoHow do we ensure that this only eats the plastic in plastic waste, and not (for example) the plastic in electrical insulation?
- bratwurst3000 4y agoI always wonder with all the land files in the world those enzyme Should have already developed in my opinion. So why are there still landfills?
- bluSCALE4 4y agoThis is cool and all but I really worry about this going out of control. Just like trees had nothing to eat them, right now, plastics don't either. All of our infrastructure relies on plastic so if that suddenly starting getting compromised, we'd be royally screwed.
- bregma 4y agoComing off a global pandemic it is good to know that a self-replicating microbe capable of destroying much of our infrastructure in a short time has been found in the wild.
- hrdwdmrbl 4y agoAnyone else read Oryx and Crake?
- AngryData 4y agoIf our plan is to turn it into gas and CO2, why not burn it and get some energy out of it first? Degrading plastic sitting out in nature would be good because it removes plastic from the environment, but degrading the plastic in landfills removes carbon from the landfill, which can be capped and contained, and moves it into the air where carbon sequestering takes even more energy.
- shafyy 4y agoHere's a good article with various data points on plastic pollution from Our World in Data: https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-pollution https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-pollution
- air7 4y agoPlastic sitting around is a landfill is just unsexy carbon capture. I'm no expert but given the excess of carbon in the air, it's not out of the question that a viable way forward is actually using more light plastic materials, not bothering with recycling or alternatives (when these are not cost/energy effective), and just putting it in big holes where they will presumable stay unscathed, until (maybe) some day it would be worthwhile to dig them out and reuse the carbon. The whole life cycle is generally carbon neutral, and might even offset more energy demanding alternative products. I feel that the general aversion to plastic is due to problems that arose more from waste mismanagement that caused the Great Pacific Garbage Patch for example, and not necessarily from the lifecycle of the products themselves.
- Beltiras 4y agoHere's a thought. Since there are enzymes that break down plastics, isn't it just a matter of time before we get macroscopic organisms that start to make it and use it to feed on the plastics? The reason we have coal is because plants developed lignins and for a long time fungi could not break down the lignins (hence the accumulation of carbon). Then fungi developed strategies to break down lignins and the accumulation of carbon stopped. Same with this. It's just a matter of time till some organism develops a way to break down plastics into usable material.
- ryankrage77 4y agoWe've only had plastics for the better part of a century. How long did it take the fungi to evolve to eat lignins?
- Beltiras 4y agoI don't remember. Heard it during a podcast during the last year, don't even remember which podcast and what the topic was.