New Enzyme Breaks Down Plastic Faster Than Ever Before!

 Posted by Julia Munoz

British and American researchers have developed new enzymes that speed up the breakdown of plastic. This new method is faster, more affordable, and works better on a large scale than current methods. The New York Times article claims that the new “super enzyme” has the ability to break down plastic much more quickly and can create raw materials to make new bottles, while making the material easier to repurpose.

Prof. John McGeehan in Britain in 2018.

Worldwide, there are 359 million tons of plastic produced annually. Of the 359 million tons, at least 150 million tons of this plastic is sitting in landfills or in the environment somewhere. While sitting in the ocean, plastic can take up to 450 years to degrade, if it does at all. The plastic that does break down in the ocean can be found in marine life, ocean water, and even the guts of humans.

The journal PNAS, was published by scientists at the University of Portsmouth, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, focuses on a mixture of two enzymes found in bacterium in Japan in 2016. In 2018, while studying the first enzymes ability to break down plastic, the researchers added the second enzyme and found that the plastics were broken down six times as fast.

This article is chemistry related because the enzyme can only effectively break down the plastic based on their chemical composition. While this article is not linked to much controversy, the article is about a major problem that the world today is facing. I think that this would be a good

article to show a CHEM 100 class because while it is not too difficult in terms of chemistry terms and concepts, it does show a very current and pressing issue in our environment today and how chemistry can be used to work towards solving the problem.