Novel, Plastic-Eating Bacteria May Help To Fight Pollution

Plastic has been the villain of the environment, even as 56 million tons are added to the earth's waste every year. The planet seems to be getting engulfed by the material. However, an exciting, new solution seems to be hitting the headlines. A new, Japanese bacteria has shown that it can chomp the stuff.

 Its favorite food is polyethylene terephthalate, also called PET or polyester. This bacteria can eat away sundry objects, such as clothes, bottles and packages. Though it is composed of two simple compounds, it has a long and interesting name that it deserves for its talent--- Ideonella sakaiensis.

"We have shared the possibility of biological recycling of plastic," said Shosuke Yoshida, lead author of the study from Kyoto University. "We want to develop this discovery into the application. This is the very first step."

This amazing organism totally degraded low-quality plastic in just six weeks, probably because it evolved a few enzymes that were specialized to break down PET in response to the high quantities of plastics that have accumulated in the environment over the past 70 years.

"If you put a bacteria in a situation where they've only got one food source to consume, over time they will adapt to do that," said Tracy Mincer, a researcher at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. "I think we are seeing how nature can surprise us and, in the end, the resiliency of nature itself."

Hence, there is hope that the bacteria can eat away the masses of plastic waste everywhere. However, it is said to eat very slowly, even though it grows fast, so Yoshida believes that it can be speeded up.

"It's certainly a move in the right direction. Having an organism that seems to be capable of biodegrading these components directly will help us develop a bioremediation technology," concluded John Coates, a microbiologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved with the work.

The findings were recently published in the journal Science.