20160307 - PET plastic

Bacteria found to eat PET plastics 

Nature has beaten us to it again. It has taken just 70 years for evolution to throw up a bacterium capable of breaking down and consuming PET, one of the world’s most problematic plastic pollutants.
Japanese researchers discovered and named the species, Ideonella sakaiensis, by analysing microbes living on debris of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastics they collected from soil and wastewater.
The bacterium seems to feed exclusively on PET and breaks it down using just two enzymes. It must have evolved the capability to do this because the plastics were only invented in the 1940s.
The team hopes the discovery will lead to new ways of breaking down plastic, using either the bacteria themselves, or the two enzymes they use for the job.
New ways of breaking down PET are sorely needed – vast quantities of discards clog up landfill sites and natural environments around the world. In 2013, 56 million tonnes of PET were manufactured – about a quarter of all plastics produced that year – but only 2.2 million tonnes were recycled, the team says.
“Large quantities of PET have accumulated in environments across the globe,” says Kohei Oda of Kyoto Institute of Technology in Japan, whose team made the discovery. “So, to solve this problem, microbes that break it down could be useful.”

 https://www.newscientist.com/article/2080279-bacteria-found-to-eat-pet-plastics-could-help-do-the-recycling/?utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=SOC&utm_campaign=hoot&cmpid=SOC|NSNS|2016-GLOBAL-hoot