A plastic container thrown into landfill can take hundreds of years to break down naturally, but a newly discovered enzyme could eat up the waste in less than a day.
Even when a plastic product is sent to a recycling plant, the process to melt it down and create something new is energy intensive and expensive.
Biological recycling, on the other hand, could help to create a cheap and efficient circular plastic economy. Over the past few years, scientists have beenPHL7 stands out from other candidates found so far. The way it rapidly breaks down PET seems to hinge on a single building block in its DNA. At a certain spot in its amino acid sequence, PHL7 carries a leucine where other enzymes carry phenylalanine residue. In the past, leucine in this position has been linked to the binding of polymers to enzymes.When researchers in Germany replaced phenylalanine with leucine in another enzyme, the organism became much faster at breaking down plastic. In fact, its efficiency was on par with PHL7.
Given the dire state of plastic pollution worldwide, that sounds like a dream. The team of researchers at Leipzig University are now working on a prototype.
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