Plastics recycling with microbes and worms is further away than people think

Bertocchini and her team attributed the peaks to a breakdown product, ethylene glycol, likely generated by a caterpillar enzyme or an enzyme in its gut microbes (Curr. From that microbe, the scientists plucked two enzymes that degraded PET to its monomers of terephthalic acid and ethylene glycol (Science 2016, DOI: headlines claimed the microbe could help with recycling, but breakdown took six weeks on a small plastic sample, too slow for immediate applications. Yang, who wasn’t involved with the work, pointed out another caveat of the study in a technical comment in Science: The team in Japan worked with low-crystallinity PET film, which worked better for screening purposes but is relatively easy to degrade compared with the higher-crystallinity PET in water bottles and other common products (2016, DOI: Science

This microbe contains PETase and MHETase, two enzymes that depolymerize PET to its monomers (scheme shown).

Source: cen.acs.org