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Though its effects are not always visible to the naked eye, plastic is choking life on Earth. Birds are dying from plastic accumulating their intestines. Animals are full of microplastics, and humans are unintentionally eating a credit card’s worth of plastic every week, which is seeping into our bloodstream. And the ocean is becoming an open plastic dump to the extent that microplastic particles may outnumber zooplankton. 
These harrowing scenes could come to define our planet’s future. The process for manufacturing plastic exacerbates climate change, and the prevalence of plastic in the environment has led to heartbreaking sights like sea turtles with straws stuck up their noses. Yet because plastic is designed to be durable and lasting, scientists who dream of permanently removing it from our environment have often despaired of solutions. 
One oft-floated pipe dream as to how to alleviate plastic pollution: can we breed something that will consume it?
RELATED: How plastic pollution threatens our health, food systems, and civilization itself
A new study suggests that an enzyme which targets polyethylene terephthalate (PET) — a widely-used polymer found in a majority of consumer packaging products that comprises 12 percent of all global waste — could make that scientific dream, which is also planetary necessity, into a reality.
The key ingredient was a natural enzyme known as PETase, according to the paper published in the scientific journal Nature. Using a machine learning model, scientists at the University of Texas at Austin’s Cockrell School of Engineering and College of Natural Sciences figured out what mutations would cause the enzyme to be able to quickly break down the targeted types of plastic waste.
“Collectively, our results demonstrate a viable route for enzymatic plastic recycling at the industrial scale,” the researchers conclude in their paper.

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“Enzyme scale-up has been a well-explored problem in many industries,” Hal Alper, professor in the McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering at UT Austin, told Salon by email when asked how long it would take for this enzyme to be available on a wide scale. “Therefore, we feel that this part of the problem is easily achievable in a short period of time. The more challenging aspect will be implementing enzyme degradation on a large scale with mixed stream plastics.” (Mixed stream plastics are all non-bottle plastics collected from the waste stream, or the entire life cycle of the garbage produced in a community.)

This was not the first effort to find biological means of solving the plastic pollution problem. In March 2016, Japanese researchers found a bacteria known as Ideonella sakaiensis that, they marveled, would “eat” the plastic outside of an Osaka bottle factory until it turned into sludge.

Alper added, when asked about how the new team’s research built on previous efforts to address plastic pollution, “We utilized the enzymes that have been found in bacteria evolved to use PET. By starting with this enzyme as a scaffold, we applied machine learning techniques to substantially improve upon function.”
As Alper’s reply indicates, this was not the first effort to find biological means of solving the plastic pollution problem. It all began, as much of scientific history does, with a random crucial discovery. In March 2016, Japanese researchers found a bacteria known as Ideonella sakaiensis that, they marveled, would “eat” the plastic outside of an Osaka bottle factory until it turned into sludge. “The new species, Ideonella sakaiensis, breaks down the plastic by using two enzymes to hydrolyze PET and a primary reaction intermediate, eventually yielding basic building blocks for growth,” the scientists wrote.
Plastic-eating bacteria was later discovered in Oregon and Germany by subsequent researchers, demonstrating to scientists that there could be a biological solution to the plastic problem. By 2020, scientists at the University of Portsmouth had managed to alter the PETase enzyme to create a supposed “cocktail” that could digest plastic up to six times faster than normal. In the abstract of their paper, the researchers singled out the discovery of the Ideonella sakaiensis as vital to their research, as well as addressing an international catastrophe.
“Plastics pollution represents a global environmental crisis,” the authors wrote. “In response, microbes are evolving the capacity to utilize synthetic polymers as carbon and energy sources.”
Last year, scientists at the University of Edinburgh announced that E. coli, a common bacteria, could be used to convert PET into vanillin, the primary component of extracted vanilla beans. They even suggested that the vanillin might be able to be safely consumed by humans, although they emphasized that further experiments would be required.
Joanna Sadler, a biotechnology professor at the University of Edinburgh who was not involved in the most recent study but was involved in the E. coli study, seemed hopeful about the developments in the latest paper. Sadler characterized the new enzyme as the “fastest enzyme reported to date” in terms of the speed at which it can “depolymerise” different plastic substrates. 
“This makes it a very promising technological development in the field, and demonstrates the ‘evolvability’ of this enzyme,” Sadler said.
Alper, not surprisingly, echoed Sadler’s hopeful tone.
“Our enzyme is up to 30x more efficient than reported enzymes and operates at lower temperatures and thus saves on energy input and improves the ease of downstream processing,” Alper wrote to Salon.
For more Salon articles on plastic pollution:

As Canada’s Arctic continues to accumulate plastic, and climate change takes its toll on northern environments and communities, experts have evidence to suggest each threat is exacerbating the other, according to a recent paper published in Nature this month.As climate change affects temperatures and water patterns, says the review, plastic has become a more common sight within Arctic waters, snow, animals, and even ice drilled from some of the north’s most isolated glaciers. In return, these plastics contribute to an environment that absorbs more heat, encouraging changes in Earth’s climate that disproportionately impact the Arctic — which has warmed at a rate two to three times faster than the rest of the world in the past 50 years. However, given the limited amount of data available on the Arctic’s plastic build-up, experts say the intensity of the interplay between the two can’t be determined just yet.Climate change’s role in the movement of plastic affects the Arctic in unique ways, said Dr. Jennifer Provencher, co-author of the paper, and a conservation biologist who studies the impacts of plastic on marine wildlife. As climate change increases surface-water temperatures, winds and water patterns shift, bringing plastics from farther south into even the most remote parts of the Arctic. This has caused microplastics — particularly those that have been evaporated into the atmosphere through the water cycle in other parts of the world — to be deposited into Arctic sea ice.Dr. Provencher pointed to a study conducted in 2019, during which a team of American scientists drilled 18 ice cores from Lancaster Sound in Canada’s Arctic and found an abundance of plastic within them, indicating microplastic infiltration in some of the north’s most isolated areas. As elevated temperatures encourage the rapid melting of this ice, said Dr. Provencher, those with significant deposits will unleash a large amount of plastic into the Arctic.“Currently, we have very little trend data on plastics accumulation, because we had almost no samples 10 years ago and nothing to build those trends from,” she said. “What I can say is that for most of the environmental samples that have been taken since, we find microplastics.”Dr. Provencher and her co-authors reviewed a number of ways in which plastics have contributed to a similar uptick in the climate’s effects on the north, including how they could negatively impact key Arctic carbon sinks. Plastic particles’ impacts on the diets and habitats of phytoplankton communities could affect how much carbon these marine algae are able to absorb from the atmosphere. Microplastics also have the potential to darken sea ice and glacial snow, the paper said, interrupting their ability to reflect sunlight away from the Earth and help keep it cool.This cooling system is integral to a stable Arctic environment, and its disturbance is a big reason why the far north is heating up so much faster than the rest of the planet, said Dr. Chris Derksen, a research scientist at Environment and Climate Change Canada who specializes in the cryosphere (the term for the frozen-water layer of the Earth’s surface). As rising temperatures melt snow and ice and leave behind heat-absorbent open sea water, the melting cycle is sped up, which disproportionately affects the Arctic.“We call it a positive feedback loop, where a change in one direction reinforces and increases the severity of that change,” said Dr. Derksen. “So as we lose snow and sea ice because the planet is warming, that contributes to further warming, which causes us to lose more snow and sea ice … and the cycle continues.”The more plastic there is in the Arctic and around the world, the harsher the consequences are for the north — especially considering the chemical breakdown of plastics itself emits greenhouse gases. A study published in PLOS One in 2018 by Dr. Sarah-Jeanne Royer, an oceanographer at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in San Diego, revealed that many of the plastics that make up the bulk of plastic pollution worldwide release methane and ethylene when degrading under sunlight — the former being 25 times more potent at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.“The direct consequences of the gases emitted from plastic solely in the Arctic might not be significant,” she said, “but if we are looking at the effect of plastics emissions on worldwide climate change, and consider how climate change affects the Arctic so much more than much of the world, then that is a problem.”However, just how much plastic contributes to climate change — and vice versa — has yet to be measured. Experts are still in the process of quantifying just how much plastic there is in the Arctic, said Dr. Royer, in order to understand the true extent of the effects on Earth’s most vulnerable ecosystems.Researchers include the intergovernmental Arctic Council, with whom Dr. Provencher has worked since 2020 on their Arctic Monitoring & Assessment Programme (AMAP). The international group aims to mitigate plastics and climate change in the Arctic through collaboration, and is the first project of its scale to tackle plastics in 11 “compartments,” or spheres, of the Arctic ecosystem — from air, to soil, to ice and snow, to animals. However, its status as a multi-country initiative leaves it at risk of interruption as the result of geopolitical conflict, including current council chair Russia’s recent aggression in Ukraine, which pushed the council to suspend all meetings until further notice last month.“The good news is that there is a lot we can focus on at the domestic level,” she said. “What’s on pause is the international collaboration aspect of the work, but the international goals that we set are still there, and there’s no reason why we can’t work towards them.”One such program is the Northern Contaminants Program (NCP), a funding program established in 1991 by the federal government to examine the risk that elevated levels of contaminants in wildlife species pose to northern Indigenous peoples’ traditional diets. Since then, NCP has funded a number of plastic-related projects, emphasizing community-based monitoring that uses the concerns of local populations as its baseline for research focus.“It’s important that we co-develop the questions together [with Indigenous peoples],” said Dr. Provencher, “because in the end, it’s northern communities who feel the impacts of Arctic microplastic pollution the most.”What is important for now is that approaches to mitigating plastic and climate change in the Arctic continue to account for one another, said Dr. Derksen, as neither threat exists in a vacuum.“When we start to solve some of these problems, it’s not helpful to try and solve them in very carved-out, isolated areas,” he said. “But if we can understand the interconnected nature between them, then maybe it can spur us to try to solve them in a more comprehensive way, as opposed to just sort of throwing individual darts.”Interested in more stories about climate change? Sign up for the Globe Climate newsletter and read more from our series on climate change innovation and adaption.

The dolls keep arriving, month after month, year after year.Where they come from is a mystery, but the waves bring them in and lay them on the Texas sand, where Mission-Aransas Reserve researchers find them.AdvertisementWere they lost or were they discarded? How long ago?The ocean takes its toll, covering their beady eyes with barnacles, stealing their plastic limbs, staining their hair green with algae.AdvertisementThese dolls are creepy, Jace Tunnell says, and they won’t stop showing up.Tunnell is the director of the Mission Aransas Reserve at the University of Texas Marine Science Institute. The Reserve, about 30 miles northeast of Corpus Christi, serves as a marine research and education program.Situated on the Gulf Coast, Tunnell and his colleagues regularly survey a roughly 40-mile stretch of beach running from north Padre Island, up to Matagorda Island — an area the dolls seem to be drawn to.“We’re actually doing scientific work, but the dolls are a perk,” Tunnell told McClatchy News in a phone interview.Often, researchers are surveying the coast for sea turtles, marine mammals and endangered bird species. They comb the 40-mile span twice a week, coming across all kinds of debris in the process.“Every day is something new,” Tunnell said. “Just when you think you’ve found everything that could possibly wash up on shore, something else comes up.”Much of it is junk, some of it is interesting. The dolls occupy a category of their own, and Tunnell tries to document each of the eerie castaways on social media when they’re found.“The creepiest are the ones that have lost all their hair,” Tunnell said, though each of the 30 dolls collected since he began keeping count have been disturbing in their own way.Advertisement“The first one we had found was a sex doll, the head of it. I posted a picture of it and I didn’t realize that’s what it was,” he said. “We got a lot of followers on the page after that.”Someone purchased that doll head for $35, and Mission-Aransas gave the money to a sea turtle rescue program.A surprising number of people want the dolls, offering to take them or buy them, Tunnell said.“What are they doing with those things?” he wonders.Those who keep up with Tunnell’s weekly debris updates seem to like the dolls. Most aren’t eager to buy one or take one home, but they follow along, seemingly fascinated and unnerved by the lost and forgotten toys.“Always creeps me out…at least this one has a body,” a commenter said about a recent discovery, posted April 22.Advertisement“She has pretty eyes for a change!” wrote another.The baby doll is missing both arms and something appears to have chewed on its left leg.“This one looks happy to be found! …. not like some of the others!” a comment read.Post after post, people keep wondering the same thing: Why are so many dolls washing up in this specific place? Is this coastline cursed? Probably not, but it is a bit unlucky.Through a two-year study conducted by the UT Marine Science Institute — of which Mission-Aransas is a part — researchers learned that the Texas Coastal Bend region is a junk magnet.“Texas coastal bend beaches get 10 times the amount of trash … than any other beach in the Gulf of Mexico,” Tunnell said, compared to what researchers in Florida and Mississippi found after conducting identical projects.AdvertisementThis is due in large part to a “loop current” reaching from the Yucatan Peninsula to Florida. This current creates eddies that push debris toward the Texas Gulf, and the Coastal Bend in particular.“There’s a lot of nightmares out there” in the debris, Tunnell said, more Barbies and Cabbage Patch Kids and so on. Odds are good they’ll keep making their way to Texas.Tunnell doesn’t keep any of the eerie toys, he said, just tosses them in a bucket to be sold at a yearly fundraising auction.“They could definitely be haunted,” he said.

California’s attorney general has announced a first-of-its kind investigation into the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries for their alleged role in causing and exacerbating a global crisis in plastic waste pollution. Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said Thursday that his office has subpoenaed Exxon Mobil Corp. seeking information related to the company’s “historic and ongoing efforts” to minimize the public’s understanding of the harmful consequences of plastic. “For more than half a century, the plastics industry has engaged in an aggressive campaign to deceive the public, perpetuating a myth that recycling can solve the plastics crisis,” Bonta said.Fossil fuels such as oil and gas are the raw material of most plastics. In recent decades, the accumulation of plastic waste has overwhelmed waterways and oceans, sickening marine life and threatening human health. Climate & Environment Big fight brewing over California ballot measure to reduce single-use plastics Environmentalists and industry are at odds over a November ballot initiative that would reduce single-use plastics and polystyrene food containers. In a statement released late Thursday, Exxon Mobil denied the accusations.“We reject the allegations made by the attorney general’s office in its press release,” said Julie L. King, a spokeswoman for the corporation. “We are focused on solutions and meritless allegations like these distract from the important collaborative work that is underway to enhance waste management and improve circularity.”King said Exxon Mobil has been collaborating with governments including the state of California, communities and other industries to support commercial-scale advanced recycling.The announcement of the investigation comes amid an urgent and growing movement across California to curb plastic pollution by reducing it at its source. In the last two weeks, the city and county of Los Angeles have announced ordinances and directives to reduce plastic waste, while state legislators, lobbyists and negotiators debate a bill that could ban several forms of single-use plastics. Also, in November, Californians will have the opportunity to vote on a ballot initiative designed to curb plastic pollution.Speaking at Dockweiler State Beach — an area of Los Angeles County coast sandwiched between a Chevron oil refinery and a major sewage outflow — Bonta said that despite the public’s perception that plastics are heavily recycled, more than 90% of them end up either buried in landfills, burned or flushed into the ocean.Internal documents from the 1970s warned industry executives that recycling was “infeasible,” he noted, and that there was “serious doubt” that plastic recycling “can ever be made viable on an economic basis.” Indeed, despite the industry’s decades-long recycling campaign, the vast majority of plastic products, by design, cannot be recycled and the U.S. plastic recycling rate has never broken 9%.“In California and across the globe, we are seeing the catastrophic results of the fossil fuel industry’s decades-long campaign of deception. Plastic pollution is seeping into our waterways, poisoning our environment and blighting our landscapes,” Bonta said. “Enough is enough.” California California officials approve plan to crack down on microplastics polluting the ocean State officials have moved to limit single-use plastics and filter out the toxic pollutants from waterways before they reach the sea. No other state or country has undertaken such an investigation into the oil and plastics industry. However, California’s probe does mirror other climate change investigations and lawsuits that governments across the nation have launched against the fossil fuel industry, accusing it of deception and seeking compensation for the risks and dangers caused by its products.“This is connecting the dots at a higher level than we have ever seen before, in a way that could hold fossil fuel companies accountable for one of the greatest environmental crises of our time,” said Jennifer Savage, who leads Surfrider Foundation’s national efforts to stop plastic pollution.“Most people don’t realize how tightly plastic production is tied to the fossil fuel industry,” she said. “People don’t think of plastic pollution as a fossil fuel or climate change issue, but they’re truly two sides of the same coin. … The only way that we are going to solve the plastic pollution crisis is to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable. And this is a major step in that direction.” The attorney general’s investigation is aimed at determining if any of Exxon Mobil’s actions violated state law and were based on “good faith” understanding of open-source materials about the industry. The subpoena, Bonta noted, is just the beginning. He said his legal team was starting with Exxon Mobil because it is “one of the, if not the biggest producer of plastics in the world, as well as one of the leaders when it comes to deception. They have distinguished themselves because of the amount of plastic they have produced and put into the world.”The plastics industry began an aggressive campaign in the 1980s to sway public opinion when state legislatures and local governments tried to consider restricting or banning plastic products, Bonta said. “We will be as comprehensive, as thorough, as broad, as is necessary, to get to the bottom of this issue of the harm that plastics has caused — and the deception — both past and ongoing,” he said of the investigation.Responding to the probe’s announcement, Matthew Kastner, spokesman for the American Chemistry Council, a trade group representing Exxon Mobil and the petrochemical industry, said in a statement that “plastics belong in our economy, not our environment.” He said his organization is committed to a more “sustainable future” that includes “bold” government actions, as well as increasing recycling and waste management infrastructure. He did not specifically respond to questions about the subpoena or investigation. Jay Ziegler, director of policy and external affairs for the Nature Conservancy in California, said that Thursday’s action by the state reminded him of the major investigations that had exposed the tobacco industry. “Wow, it’s like ‘Thank You For Smoking’ all over again,” Ziegler said, referring to the satirical novel by Christopher Buckley that follows a tobacco lobbyist who promotes the benefits of cigarette smoking. Nick Lapis, director of advocacy for Californians Against Waste, agreed.“This is no different than the tactics used by the tobacco industry to promote smoking and by these same oil companies to prevent action on climate change,” he said. “They know that what they are doing is destroying the planet and affecting pubic health, but instead of investing in sustainable alternatives they spend their money to lobby against reform and to deceive the public.”Sean Hecht, co-executive director of UCLA School of Law’s Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, noted similarities to the ongoing challenges against opioid manufacturers, as well as the recent climate disinformation cases making their way through court.He also pointed to a lawsuit led by Santa Clara County against former lead paint manufacturers. The case, which was settled in 2019 after 20 years of litigation, “was seen as quite significant in establishing that there could be liability in a case like this,” he said.Plastics never fully degrade. They just break down into smaller and smaller pieces called microplastics. These particles often contain harmful chemical additives such as flame retardants or plasticizers, and a widely cited scientific review of 52 studies concluded that humans on average consume a credit card’s worth of microplastic each week. In just the last few months, research has shown the presence of plastic particles in human blood, healthy lung tissue and meconium — the first bowel movement of a newborn. They are also found in marine organisms, ocean water, air and soil.Some researchers project that by 2050, there may be more plastic by weight in the world’s oceans than there are fish. UC Davis researchers once sampled seafood sold at markets in Half Moon Bay and found that one-quarter of fish and one-third of shellfish contained plastic debris.Nevertheless, plastic production has continued to grow, and records show that the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries are still expanding their plastics infrastructure and capabilities. In the U.S. alone, companies from across the globe have invested $208 billion since 2010 in new facilities, expansions and factory restarts.State Sen. Ben Allen (D-Santa Monica), who has championed this issue for years, said that all the momentum now coming together across the state speaks to how pressing the plastics issue has become. “We all recognize what an urgent issue this is,” he said, “and that’s why we’re so deeply committed.”