Can Plastic-Eating Enzymes Save Our Planet?
For our whole lives, we’ve always heard that if not recycled, plastics will never go away, or at least will take hundreds of years to decompose, polluting oceans and harming sea life. While this is definitely still true, there might be a way around it.
Save the Planet?
During SXSW 2023, Hal Alpert, professor in the McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering at UT Austin, had a panel to discuss the new revelation that he and his students had discovered. This revelation… was FAST PETase.
Sorry, I’ll explain. Basically, FAST PETase is an enzyme that is able to break down plastics at the molecular level into smaller parts and spit out recycled, new plastics, ready to be reused. This advancement could play a huge role in solving one of the world’s most pressing environmental problems: what to do with the billions of tons of plastic waste piling up in landfills and polluting our natural lands and water.
“The possibilities are endless across industries to leverage this leading-edge recycling process,” said Hal Alper. “Beyond the obvious waste management industry, this also provides corporations from every sector the opportunity to take a lead in recycling their products. Through these more sustainable enzyme approaches, we can begin to envision a true circular plastics economy.”
Well said Hal. But you still might be wondering: why don’t we all just recycle normally, and avoid all this complicated science stuff? Well, I wish it were that simple.
The Problem
The fact of the matter is that humans just can’t be trusted to recycle. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, only 8.7% of plastics were actually recycled in 2018. This means that 91.3% of plastics ended up in landfills, or polluting the ocean.
While we’re on the topic of scary facts, did you know that this year, nearly 400 million tons of plastic will be produced? To put that into perspective, that is roughly equivalent to the weight of every human on earth. Out of all that plastic, around 14 million tons of plastic end up in the ocean every year, and plastic makes up 80% of all marine debris found from surface waters to deep-sea sediments.
It is due to unsettling facts like these that scientists are working tirelessly to find solutions like FAST PETase. However, finding the answer is one thing, but making it accessible is a whole other challenge, and that is what scientists like Hal Aplert are now working on.
Hopefully sometime in the near future these discoveries will start to be implemented, and the world can begin to heal. In the meantime we can all do our part by cutting down on plastic usage, switching to sustainable options, and making sure to recycle when we do use plastic.
Edited by Antonio.
