Most of the plastic we use doesn’t get recycled. Instead, it ends up in landfills, where it can take as long as 450 years for it to fully decompose. Engineers and scientists at the University of Texas at Austin may have discovered a potential solution: a new enzyme variant that has a taste for plastic and can break the material down in a matter of hours instead of centuries.
The researchers used a machine-learning model to explore potential mutations of a natural enzyme known as PETase, with the goal of finding a variant that would be capable of degrading polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastics — the material that makes up the majority of plastic waste generated globally. Everything from soda bottles to food containers to even some clothes contains PET plastics.
