By Sahil Gada
At this moment of time a world without plastics may seem like a giant hoax, and how could it not be? Literally 8.3 billion tonnes of plastic have been made as of this point and full scale production only started back in the 1950’s. That is like 83000000000000 kg ( 83 FOLLOWED BY TWELVE ZEROS)! Can you even imagine how it took less than 70 years for plastic to become the villain in our story? Right now about 4.8 to 12.7 million tonnes of plastic enters into the ocean annually and the damage that it causes will fall short of an entire book!
Nature, being so very kind to us, has given us a cure! Almost everything you see around you right now is being eaten by organisms called microbes which are invisible to the naked eye. A particular species of this microbe has the ability to consume plastic and works perfectly well in the deep sea conditions! Although, if we are aware of such species of microbes, why aren’t they being used on a large scale to remove all the plastic from under the oceans? To answer this, let's find out how this microbe was discovered…
When plastics are discarded into the ocean, they do not biodegrade but instead break down into millions of tiny pieces. This is because plastic is made of refined oil, gas and coal and then turned into long repeating chains called polymers. The process of making plastics is thus complex and involves many modifications. Since it has only been in practice since the 1950’s, the current generation of microbes are not evolved enough to be able to consume them.
In 2016 a group of Japanese researchers found a microbe named the Ideanella Sakaiensis 201-F6 in the sludge of a plastic recycling plant. This microbe has 2 enzymes with the power of digesting PET polymers, that too at relatively low temperatures. Future experimentation on this led to the creation of a super enzyme which could digest it about 6 times faster. Shockingly even with this, the enzyme took weeks to digest a very thin sheet of PET polymers.
If you think this is interesting, there was another group of scientists in Japan who found gene sequences in a compost pile with which enzymes could be modified for degrading polymers at higher temperatures, helping them become weak and digestible. Looking at all this progress, the future of plastics looks a bit more promising and hopefully may work efficiently enough to actually apply and use this for our good!
great article!!