The plastic eating bacteria that could change the world

October 8, 2023 9:42 PM

When a microbe was found munching on a plastic bottle in a rubbish dump, it promised a recycling revolution. Now scientists are attempting to turbocharge those powers in a bid to solve our waste crisis. [Guardian]
posted by blue shadows (35 comments total)

"Honey, my phone's melting into a sort of gray goo..."
posted by pracowity at 10:05 PM on October 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

Yeah, no unintended consequences could possibly arise:
"Di Lorenzo is convinced the danger of this kind of work is minimal." Sounds like suitable famous last words...
posted by birdsquared at 10:22 PM on October 8, 2023 [13 favorites]

I am reminded of this paragraph from a 2017 article I read the other day

In 2011, during SEM visits to the plastisphere, the microbial ecologists discovered “pit formers”—microbes that appear to be creating craters on the plastic’s surface—on samples they collected from the open ocean. It was the first time pit formers had been noted on plastic from a natural environment. They believe pit formers are degrading plastic, though so far have no evidence that they’re consuming it (and Amaral-Zettler quickly notes that pit formers are definitely not the solution to the world’s plastic debris problem)

which is right next to my favorite bit from the whole article:

Their larger investigation into microplastics has also yielded other surprises: they’ve learned that microbial communities on microplastics are significantly different than populations in the surrounding seawater, and from one piece to the next. “I wasn’t anticipating that,” says Amaral-Zettler. “It still astounds me there hasn’t been more homogenization of communities.” They chalk that up to the fact that each piece of microplastic in the ocean could have a different life history. Where it comes from—a sewage plant or the back of a boat, for example—how much ultraviolet radiation or wave action it’s been exposed to, or whether it’s been swallowed and expelled again by an animal could all influence the microbial community. What’s more, life in the plastisphere is dynamic, with competition and predator-prey interactions, and—as on any island property—is limited by resources such as nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium, and carbon.

posted by aniola at 10:43 PM on October 8, 2023 [15 favorites]

life in the plastisphere

worst story John Varley never wrote
posted by away for regrooving at 11:51 PM on October 8, 2023 [7 favorites]

Hey ice-nine wasn't so bad.
posted by Carillon at 12:10 AM on October 9, 2023 [13 favorites]

Doomwatch S01E01: The Plastic Eaters (1970)

A plane dissolves in mid-air, its plastic components eaten away. Doomwatch faces its first challenge: to halt the disastrous spread of a man-made virus with the power to melt all plastic.
posted by Bigbootay. Tay! Tay! Blam! Aargh... at 12:12 AM on October 9, 2023 [11 favorites]

A bit more 2016 detail on the 'orphan' enzymes involved in PET breakdown. The two enzyme genes are located in different places in the bacterial genome and are not closely related to anything else - hence 'orphan'. At the time, I thought it would make a great student honours project to compare the genes to the whole sequence database. Never 'appened.
posted by BobTheScientist at 12:36 AM on October 9, 2023 [5 favorites]

Eventually, someone (maybe governments) will create a sort of digestive system for all garbage. They'll bring unsorted garbage (plastic, paper, metal, organic, everything) in by train or barge or whatever, dump it at the beginning of a recycling complex the size of a county, and let robots and lagoons of garbage-eating creatures convert everything to usable raw materials, capture useful heat and gases, and ship stuff back out on the same trains and barges.
posted by pracowity at 1:40 AM on October 9, 2023 [12 favorites]

Now scientists are attempting to turbocharge those powers in a bid to solve our waste crisis.

1935: One hundred and two cane toads are shipped to Australia to eliminate the beetles that are destroying the sugar cane crop... how could it go wrong?
posted by fairmettle at 1:41 AM on October 9, 2023 [17 favorites]

Its interesting that they are looking at enzymes which are adept at breaking down wood to see if they can be adapted to take on plastic. See the video "When wood plagued earth" - when wood first evolved there was nothing that could break it down so it accumulated until wood destroying fungi, which could break down cellulose and lignin emerged about 290 million years ago. It seems we are looking for their assistance again.
posted by rongorongo at 1:51 AM on October 9, 2023 [16 favorites]

Melting all the evil plastics, even the useful ones, might not be a bad thing in the long run - we'll have to stop making them, there will be no point
posted by mbo at 1:57 AM on October 9, 2023 [3 favorites]

Having been an assiduous reader of New Scientist magazine since the late 1970s (I started young), I can say that stories about a discovery of plastic-eating enzymes/bacteria/amoebas/whatnot rock up every five or six years, and then nothing happens until the next story.
posted by Hogshead at 2:53 AM on October 9, 2023 [31 favorites]

Melting all the evil plastics, even the useful ones, might not be a bad thing in the long run

Unless, of course, your medical treatment or whatever depends on something best made of plastic.

But we should definitely design specifically matched pairs of plastics and plastic-eaters. If you want something to degrade, you make it with plastic A and you know it will be eaten by the creatures from the blech lagoon. If you want it to be resistant to degradation, you make it with plastic B, which you have selected or designed to disgust or kill any plastic-eating beast that tries to eat it.
posted by pracowity at 4:13 AM on October 9, 2023 [7 favorites]

Similar but different: Using plastic to make Hydrogen and graphene.

This is, honestly, the most optimistic thing I've read in a while. Now get 'money/capitalism' interested in this (because in 5-10 years all batteries will be made out of graphene (I read somewhere)) and golly, something good could come of it.
posted by From Bklyn at 4:35 AM on October 9, 2023 [6 favorites]

It's not the end of plastics. Despite wood-eating bacteria, I still have lots of practical and useful things which are made from wood in my home. It just gives hope we might have much less microplastic around in the future.
posted by ambrosen at 4:45 AM on October 9, 2023 [12 favorites]

I always wonder about the people who are worried about all our plastic melting.

Do they not know that there are zillions of organisms out there that eat wood?

And yet my house has been fine for a hundred years.

Context matters, and none of this stuff we've seen so far acts all that different from fungi eating wood.

Prior to fungi, wood just piled up everywhere, miles deep, and it was a huge problem for everyone. Having a cycle where stuff gets broken down is a good thing.
posted by SaltySalticid at 4:58 AM on October 9, 2023 [16 favorites]

it’s going to be interesting when you have to start replacing plastic goods in your home because they’ve got an infection. putting my tv remote in the fridge to extend its lifespan. house flooded because the pex plumbing was eaten by bacteria. there’s massive plastic waste, yes, but that’s because plastic has become so central to our lives. the plastic bacteria is kind of scary
posted by dis_integration at 5:07 AM on October 9, 2023 [4 favorites]

Classic horror novel: Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters
posted by Billiken at 5:22 AM on October 9, 2023 [3 favorites]

Classic horror novel: Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters

Yes, it's actually mentioned further down in the Guardian article, although I was thinking of it as soon as I saw the headline. It is based on the first episode of Doomwatch as linked to above, although as I recall the authors changed the characters and removed all references to Doomwatch - whether this was because of some sort of rights issue with the BBC I have no idea.
posted by Major Clanger at 5:34 AM on October 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

They chalk that up to the fact that each piece of microplastic in the ocean could have a different life history

Plastic sample 4105812: A tentative truce has been made with the colony, as it has rapidly developed from stone age levels to producing rudimentary nuclear weapons. Some time between 6:20pm and 8:07pm on October 5th they cracked the code of quantum computing and have offered to exchange information for a larger piece of a Mountain Dew Code Red bottle to colonize.
posted by AzraelBrown at 6:00 AM on October 9, 2023 [21 favorites]

I always wonder about the people who are worried about all our plastic melting.

Do they not know that there are zillions of organisms out there that eat wood?

Sure, but we know a lot about them after many years of observation. I think the worry is that a particularly hungry plastic-eating bug could do a lot of damage before we get it under control. We design one to very efficiently eat all those millions of tons of plastic waste and then, oops, it's migrating back up its food chain and infecting all of the manufacturing, warehousing, and delivery systems that contain all that plastic before it's supposed to be garbage. I don't know how likely that is, but surprises happen.
posted by pracowity at 6:32 AM on October 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

You mean life, uh, finds a way?
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 6:45 AM on October 9, 2023 [3 favorites]

Back in the 70s people started to realize that the convenient plastic packaging that was starting to be prevalent was causing environmental problems. There was litter, sure, but people were also concerned about the effects that plastic in the environment was going to have on human beings. So they created a movement to demand that the government regulate plastic production.

There are three distinct moments in my life when I remember having the vivid feeling that the world was going to be made measurably worse by what I'd just witnessed. The September 11th attacks, of course, and then when I heard Citizens United had passed, both of those were bad. My first experience of that feeling, though, was when the Federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act was passed.

You can't fix this problem by dealing with consumption.

Governments can't. Bacteria can't.

Producing the plastics in the first place is the problem.

The government's commitment to regulating consumption and letting production run wild, despite its obvious downstream consequences, made it obvious to teenage me that the world wasn't going to get saved. "Recycling is the government's way of telling you pollution is your fault" was my slogan there for a couple of years.

And that, in case you were wondering, is how I became a doomer.
posted by MrVisible at 6:53 AM on October 9, 2023 [12 favorites]

Ok, before you go putting your TV remote in the fridge, think about temperature and moisture. The words "slimy film" appear right at the top of the article. This stuff needs moisture to break down plastic.

If I leave my hammer outside all year, the handle will likely be too rotted to use safely. Honestly, your remote probably won't survive outside all year either. But the point is, we have no problem keeping lots of things dry to keep them from failing, it's so much of a norm that we don't really think much about it.

I'm not so bullish on rampant genetic engineering and releasing stuff into the wild, but I'm not really scared of this stuff that has solved the problem of how to eat PET in a warm damp environment.
posted by SaltySalticid at 6:56 AM on October 9, 2023 [5 favorites]

Given that most of the time they're referring to using enzymes in a reactor, which is something we already do on a massive scale for other industries, we probably don't need to focus too much on intentional release of engineered organisms as that's pretty far down the "to-do list" (so to speak). The engineered organisms they're mainly referring to would be grown in massive tanks to harvest the enzymes, which would then be used in an enzyme reactor.

You can buy an enzyme reactor if you want to toy with the concept (or if, for some arcane reason, you are SUPER into converting glucose to fructose and need to do it at home)
posted by aramaic at 7:13 AM on October 9, 2023 [7 favorites]

You can buy an enzyme reactor if you want to toy with the concept

1. Cat food
2. Toilet paper
3. BE1 Batch Enzyme Reactor
4. Bread
posted by pracowity at 7:22 AM on October 9, 2023

2. Toilet paper

You making moonshine?
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 7:32 AM on October 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

There was a study years ago looking at how soil bacteria dealt with certain persistent toxins, PCBs I think, undertaken with the hope that if they could find bacteria which could break them down, those bacteria could be used in remediation efforts.

They found such bacteria, and it turned out that the bacteria were metabolizing the toxic chemicals into chemicals that were even more toxic and using them to enhance their ability to compete.

Which is the kind of outcome I expect from the effort to find plastic eating bacteria.
posted by jamjam at 10:42 AM on October 9, 2023 [3 favorites]

Melting all the evil plastics, even the useful ones, might not be a bad thing in the long run - we'll have to stop making them, there will be no point

And then humankind's work will be complete. (starting at ~3:40)
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:23 AM on October 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

Melting all the evil plastics, even the useful ones, might not be a bad thing in the long run - we'll have to stop making them, there will be no point

As a bonus killing billions of people via a world wide mass famine would certainly slow down the climate crisis.
posted by Mitheral at 4:15 PM on October 9, 2023

I am genuinely loving the back and forth on this thread.

A bacterium that destroyed all the plastics in the world could be bad.

But

Human civilization advanced to the creation of plastic, without using plastic.
posted by B3taCatScan at 5:33 PM on October 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

Absolutely on Team Microbes here.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 6:34 PM on October 9, 2023

Well, on one hand it would be great to find a way to deal with the mountains of plastic waste without creating something worse in the process. On the other hand, what happens when the microbes reproduce uncontrollably and run out of plastic?
posted by dg at 7:13 PM on October 9, 2023

That's the beautiful part - when wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:33 PM on October 9, 2023 [4 favorites]

I keep sincerely hoping that we can make single use disposable plastics flat illegal. We’ve had ample warnings for so long explaining the danger of these, we have viable alternatives for so much of it (glass, aluminum, plant-based bioplastics that actually decompose, etc.).

But, you know, same deal with global warming, look how well politicians responded to that issue. So I have hope, but not much faith.
posted by caution live frogs at 5:44 AM on October 10, 2023 [1 favorite]