A novel plastic-eating enzyme may solve our plastic woes once and for all

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cancel2 2022

Canceled
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This looks extremely promising!

Researchers around the world have been coming up with ingenious solutions such as reusing plastic into building blocks and even turning it into useful oils. But still, the problem persists on a large scale.

Engineers and scientists at The University of Texas at Austin have come up with an innovative solution that may just resolve our plastic woes once and for all, according to a statement released by the institution on Wednesday. The solution takes the shape of an enzyme variant that gobbles up environment-throttling plastics that typically take centuries to degrade in just a matter of hours to days.

https://interestingengineering.com/novel-plastic-eating-enzyme
 
Primavera said:
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This looks extremely promising!

Researchers around the world have been coming up with ingenious solutions such as reusing plastic into building blocks and even turning it into useful oils. But still, the problem persists on a large scale.

Engineers and scientists at The University of Texas at Austin have come up with an innovative solution that may just resolve our plastic woes once and for all, according to a statement released by the institution on Wednesday. The solution takes the shape of an enzyme variant that gobbles up environment-throttling plastics that typically take centuries to degrade in just a matter of hours to days.

https://interestingengineering.com/novel-plastic-eating-enzyme
Click to expand...

I think I saw this movie.......*spoiler alert*......it gets loose, evolves and starts eating everyone......they name it the Blob......
 
this is the problem with scientists who steadfastly believe that what they are doing is going to fix a problem...............and while it MIGHT fix an immediate problem, they apparently are unable to have any real forward vision as to what happens after that problem is fixed

ed19a92b6c9b73037ebc733cc857ed3e.jpg
 
so, do we just dump this stuff in the middle of a Pacific Ocean plastic island and see what it does?.......or do we carefully control it in a lab in Wuhan......
 
PostmodernProphet said:
so, do we just dump this stuff in the middle of a Pacific Ocean plastic island and see what it does?.......or do we carefully control it in a lab in Wuhan......
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Here is the abstract from the Nature paper, if you want anymore you'll have to pay for it.

Abstract
Plastic waste poses an ecological challenge1,2,3 and enzymatic degradation offers one, potentially green and scalable, route for polyesters waste recycling4. Poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET) accounts for 12% of global solid waste5, and a circular carbon economy for PET is theoretically attainable through rapid enzymatic depolymerization followed by repolymerization or conversion/valorization into other products6,7,8,9,10. Application of PET hydrolases, however, has been hampered by their lack of robustness to pH and temperature ranges, slow reaction rates and inability to directly use untreated postconsumer plastics11. Here, we use a structure-based, machine learning algorithm to engineer a robust and active PET hydrolase. Our mutant and scaffold combination (FAST-PETase: functional, active, stable and tolerant PETase) contains five mutations compared to wild-type PETase (N233K/R224Q/S121E from prediction and D186H/R280A from scaffold) and shows superior PET-hydrolytic activity relative to both wild-type and engineered alternatives12 between 30 and 50 °C and a range of pH levels. We demonstrate that untreated, postconsumer-PET from 51 different thermoformed products can all be almost completely degraded by FAST-PETase in 1 week. FAST-PETase can also depolymerize untreated, amorphous portions of a commercial water bottle and an entire thermally pretreated water bottle at 50 ºC. Finally, we demonstrate a closed-loop PET recycling process by using FAST-PETase and resynthesizing PET from the recovered monomers. Collectively, our results demonstrate a viable route for enzymatic plastic recycling at the industrial scale.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04599-z
 
maggot;
A novel plastic-eating enzyme may solve our plastic woes once and for all
Click to expand...


Put some on your head.




Haw, haw.......................................haw.
 
Primavera said:
.
This looks extremely promising!

Researchers around the world have been coming up with ingenious solutions such as reusing plastic into building blocks and even turning it into useful oils. But still, the problem persists on a large scale.

Engineers and scientists at The University of Texas at Austin have come up with an innovative solution that may just resolve our plastic woes once and for all, according to a statement released by the institution on Wednesday. The solution takes the shape of an enzyme variant that gobbles up environment-throttling plastics that typically take centuries to degrade in just a matter of hours to days.

https://interestingengineering.com/novel-plastic-eating-enzyme
Click to expand...

Yea, until it starts eating "good" plastic we want because it's eaten all the plastic we don't want...
 
Primavera said:
.
This looks extremely promising!

Researchers around the world have been coming up with ingenious solutions such as reusing plastic into building blocks and even turning it into useful oils. But still, the problem persists on a large scale.

Engineers and scientists at The University of Texas at Austin have come up with an innovative solution that may just resolve our plastic woes once and for all, according to a statement released by the institution on Wednesday. The solution takes the shape of an enzyme variant that gobbles up environment-throttling plastics that typically take centuries to degrade in just a matter of hours to days.

https://interestingengineering.com/novel-plastic-eating-enzyme
Click to expand...

Introducing species into local eco systems has been shown to be disastrous on so many occasions that one might almost expect this to be a discredited action by now.

Apparently, not so much.

On a different part of this consideration, the talk about the "island" of plastic floating in the Pacific moved the restaurants in Indianapolis to change over to paper straws that collapse if used from the plastic ones that worked.

Again, apparently, they were worried that the plastic straws buried in the local land fill would migrate in huge herds across the plains, over the Rocky Mountains and into the Pacific to try to be buried in the noses of Sea Turtles.

The plastic being dumped into the Pacific from the residents in Asia is not really increased or decreased by the plastic being buried in Indiana.

We are being governed by lying thieves who are also idiots.
 
Code1211 said:
Introducing species into local eco systems has been shown to be disastrous on so many occasions that one might almost expect this to be a discredited action by now.

Apparently, not so much.

On a different part of this consideration, the talk about the "island" of plastic floating in the Pacific moved the restaurants in Indianapolis to change over to paper straws that collapse if used from the plastic ones that worked.

Again, apparently, they were worried that the plastic straws buried in the local land fill would migrate in huge herds across the plains, over the Rocky Mountains and into the Pacific to try to be buried in the noses of Sea Turtles.

The plastic being dumped into the Pacific from the residents in Asia is not really increased or decreased by the plastic being buried in Indiana.

We are being governed by lying thieves who are also idiots.
Click to expand...

Enzymes are not living organisms, they are just proteins. Once they've done their job they are broken down by bacteria.
 
Primavera said:
Depends on the monomer being used for the polymerisation process. PET has 10 carbon atoms for instance.

attachment.php
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I ask because I wonder if the enzyme, if used outdoors, will release carbon, causing the Warmistas to have a fit.

Are the enzymes eating sulphur in the plastic?
 
Bigdog said:
I ask because I wonder if the enzyme, if used outdoors, will release carbon, causing the Warmistas to have a fit.

Are the enzymes eating sulphur in the plastic?
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Don't know any current monomers that have sulphur in them, maybe in some of the plasticisers? Interesting though apparently the next generation of plastics may well be based on sulphur

Plastics of the future may be made from sulfur, not oil, putting waste to good use

https://theconversation.com/plastic...ulfur-not-oil-putting-waste-to-good-use-48425
 
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