> Recycling is the most obvious way to cut down on plastic waste.<p>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.
The 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.<p>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.<p>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.
Depends 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.
Plastic 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.<p>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
I 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.
Can'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?<p>IMO we'd be better off focusing research on reducing the waste rather than improving disposal.
Dumb question, but if plastic eating bacteria starts spreading, wouldn't we all be in a lot of trouble?<p>Will car plastic interior start to rot?<p>Will PET soda and water bottles start decomposing in the grocery store, and will they require refrigeration to prevent that?<p>Will our computer keyboards require new materials?
If 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.
Plastic sitting around is a landfill is just unsexy carbon capture.<p>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 <i>more</i> 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.<p>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.
This 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.
In terms of the enzyme engineering challenge, it turns out to have been pretty straightforward to improve upon the starting enzyme.<p>The designed enzyme sequence<p>>contains five mutations compared to wild-type [1]<p>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.<p>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<p>>Interactive visualizations of MutCompute for Fig. 1 are available at <a href="https://www.mutcompute.com/petase/5xjh" rel="nofollow">https://www.mutcompute.com/petase/5xjh</a> and <a href="https://www.mutcompute.com/petase/6ij6" rel="nofollow">https://www.mutcompute.com/petase/6ij6</a><p>1. <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04599-z" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04599-z</a>
Wouldn'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 <i>because</i> it is biologically and chemically inert.
Here'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.
having done some research on this topic, the problem is not what goes <i>into</i> 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
I 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.<p>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.
DeepMind'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.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3ct1l3y" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3ct1l3y</a>
Even 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.<p>After reading the article instead of the headline:<p>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.<p>I take issue with this:<p>"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."<p>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.
I remember reading about this in middle school.<p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/86452.Ill_Wind" rel="nofollow">https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/86452.Ill_Wind</a>
The 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.
Here's a good article with various data points on plastic pollution from Our World in Data: <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-pollution" rel="nofollow">https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-pollution</a>
Sounds like they're building on the work in the 90s of Dr. Kio Marv with OILIX: <a href="https://metalgear.fandom.com/wiki/OILIX" rel="nofollow">https://metalgear.fandom.com/wiki/OILIX</a>
Who else things of "Grey Goo"<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo</a>
We use plastic in many places with the idea that it’ll never rot.<p>Obviously we want plastic to eventually biodegrade, but I wonder what sorts of chaos would be caused by it.
And 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.
This 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.<p>Right now the only solution is to minimize plastic use as much as possible. Please keep this in mind.
I've been hearing this for 20 years.<p>I assume nothing will happen while this "news" will be used by fossil fuel companies to virtue signal "technological progress" in the plastic problem.