Plastic-Eating Enzyme Could Supercharge Recycling and Eliminate Billions of Tons of Landfill Waste
12th May 2022
A new enzyme variant can break down environment-throttling plastics that typically take centuries to degrade in just a matter of hours to days. It was created by chemical engineers and scientists at The University of Texas at Austin
This discovery, published on April 27, 2022, in the journal Nature, could help solve one of the world’s biggest environmental problems: what to do with the billions of tons of plastic waste piling up in landfills and polluting our natural lands and water. The enzyme has the potential to supercharge recycling on a large scale that would enable major industries to reduce their environmental impact by recovering and reusing plastics at the molecular level.