Skip to main content

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")

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...

Suffering from natural obsolescence

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...