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[–] 3 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Wood is a biological material made from molecules that have been sitting in Earth's biosphere for hundreds of millions of years:

Wood
→ cellulose
→ hemicellulose
→ lignin
→ sugars/aromatic compounds
→ microbial metabolism

Those molecules contain lots of chemically accessible bonds, especially C–O bonds. Plants built them using biological chemistry, so other biological chemistry can, in principle, take them apart.

An enzyme isn't a tiny animal chewing through plastic. It has to contact a polymer chain, bind it in an active site, chemically cleave a bond, release the products, and repeat.

A plastic can thwart that by being:
hydrophobic + highly crystalline + insoluble + chemically repetitive + physically inaccessible.

There's no evolutionary law saying organisms must eventually become capable of rapidly consuming any energetically favorable substance.

Evolution has to find a chemically feasible pathway. And even if it does, decomposition might be:

plastic bottle → 150 years

rather than

plastic bottle → three weeks.

And amusingly, we could simply change the plastic. If PET suddenly became unsuitable for decades-long applications because PET-eating microbes became ubiquitous, we'd manufacture polymers resistant to those enzymes, add protective layers, alter crystallinity, or use different polymers.

All and all, I’m doubtful microbes will come to our rescue. Unless we engineer them for the task, that is.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 days ago (1 child)
  • [–] 5 points 4 days ago (1 child)

    The catch is that “can eat plastic” and “can solve plastic waste” are very different thresholds.

    The bacterium almost completely degraded a PET film in about six weeks at 30C. But that film was extremely favorable material, thin and only about 1.9% crystalline.

    https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/10546322/

    That's important because a real PET bottle is much harder. PET chains in crystalline regions are packed tightly together, and the enzyme has trouble getting the polymer into its active site. Typical waste PET can have crystallinity above ~25%.

    https://doi.org/10.1007/s42452-025-07764-x

    Also, P. sakaiensis attacks PET, which is a polyester. It does not give us a general solution for:

    • polyethylene (PE) — shopping bags, films, many bottles
    • polypropylene (PP) — containers, caps, automotive plastics
    • polystyrene (PS)
    • PVC
    • PTFE

    PET happens to contain chemically convenient ester bonds:

    PET chain → ester bond → PETase can hydrolyze it
    

    Whereas polyethylene is basically:

    –C–C–C–C–C–C–
    

    There's no corresponding easy hydrolysis reaction. That's a much harder biochemical problem.

    So if you dumped P. sakaiensis into a landfill, it wouldn't start consuming “the plastic.” It would encounter a giant mixed pile, only some of which is PET, and much of that PET would be physically difficult for it to attack.

    Maybe we can engineer something inspired by P. sakaiensis. I don’t think it overcomes the bigger hurdles by itself, though.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 days ago (1 child)

    No, but there is a great prize for any organism that figures it out and unlocks all that plentiful energy, especially if it encodes the "recipe" for future generations.

    And that's just natural selection. Artificial selection could possibly speed that up, too, if it's actually possible.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 days ago (1 child)

    Artificial selection has got to be possible, given we’ve done it to our fruit merely by happenstance over the generations. And our dogs, too.

    I wonder if plastic would be more like diamond. We don’t see enzymes breaking down diamond, even though that’s been around for plenty of time.

    Natural selection could probably get there if the conditions are right, just as artificial selection could probably force those conditions in a lab. Yet I feel the it’s probably much less likely than was the case with wood.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 days ago

    Artificial selection has got to be possible, given we’ve done it to our fruit merely by happenstance over the generations. And our dogs, too.

    No, I wasn't clear. I meant for the "it" in my sentence to refer to biologically breaking down plastics, not to refer to artificial selection.

    If, for example, wax moth caterpillars can break down polyethylene in small quantities in certain concentrations, then perhaps artificial selection can amplify that effect by expanding the range of concentrations that can be treated that way, or otherwise improving efficiency or volume of processing, etc.

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