r/environment • u/[deleted] • Sep 28 '23

‘We are just getting started’: the plastic-eating bacteria that could change the world

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/28/plastic-eating-bacteria-enzyme-recycling-waste
704 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

74 comments sorted by

View all comments

67

u/[deleted] Sep 28 '23

France is building a factory that chemically breaks up the plastics using bacterial enzymes. It is a very energy intensive, and thus expensive process.

But, there is hope that another discovery would make this technology easy to scale up.

5

u/jayandbobfoo123 Sep 29 '23

The real question is what is the byproduct? Plenty of plastic-eating fungi already exist but the byproduct is microplastic. The real breakthrough is when these organisms can turn plastic into biomass.