Not plastic soup for tea again!

(Not actual size - they're probably bigger.)

Some good news for the planet this week, in the battle against plastic waste.

There’s an enzyme that chomps up PET, the plastic used in bottles. Left to it’s own devices, the plastic takes hundreds of years to break down. The creatively monikered PETase enzyme starts breaking it down in a handful of days.

All good so far, then. Nasty plastics feed some friendly enzymes. Win-win, right? Not quite – it gets a bit creepy when you look into it. Ideonella sakaiensis is a bacterium that consumes PET. Like something out of a sci-fi film, it was discovered quietly scoffing plastic at a bottle recycling plant in Japan.

Our friendly bacterium uses the enzyme as part of the snacking process. Bit weird, but fine. It seems that some plants do have a protective layer made up of something vaguely similar to polyethylene, so it’s evolved from that. Pretty damn quickly, as we’ve only been turning out plastics at scale for half a century.

A rapidly evolving bug that eats plastic. What could make this scarier? Some scientists realising it can be tweaked to “optimize” it? Step forward, Portsmouth University, who reckon they can theoretically adapt it to effectively reverse the manufacturing process, turning plastics back into their constituent building blocks, so they can be used again.

I’m freaked out now. But this is all perfectly safe, and there’s no way hungry mutant bacteria, squirting jets of plastic-melting enzyme, could get out and run amok, is there?

Is there...? Hello?

This post first appeared as the third piece in my column/page in The Mail and the News & Star, on the 20th of April 2018. The paper retained my title!

Great news story this, and an easy one to write. I wasn't big on good titles this week though, was I?

(CD A-Z: XTC's "Homegrown")

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