What’s crazy actually is that there is no “in spite of them.” He had no redemption arch. He was just made DoTY. Shows how shallow the title really is. Surely there would have been a better person to promote as DoTY, but the qualifications for the title were so meek that he got it. Weak ass shit.
Sorry to ruin your joke.
Where I’m at, you turn on the hazard to say thanks to people behind you, If you get flashed with brights, message received.
The catch is that “can eat plastic” and “can solve plastic waste” are very different thresholds.
The bacterium almost completely degraded a PET film in about six weeks at 30C. But that film was extremely favorable material, thin and only about 1.9% crystalline.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/10546322/
That’s important because a real PET bottle is much harder. PET chains in crystalline regions are packed tightly together, and the enzyme has trouble getting the polymer into its active site. Typical waste PET can have crystallinity above ~25%.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s42452-025-07764-x
Also, P. sakaiensis attacks PET, which is a polyester. It does not give us a general solution for:
PET happens to contain chemically convenient ester bonds:
PET chain → ester bond → PETase can hydrolyze it
Whereas polyethylene is basically:
–C–C–C–C–C–C–
There’s no corresponding easy hydrolysis reaction. That’s a much harder biochemical problem.
So if you dumped P. sakaiensis into a landfill, it wouldn’t start consuming “the plastic.” It would encounter a giant mixed pile, only some of which is PET, and much of that PET would be physically difficult for it to attack.
Maybe we can engineer something inspired by P. sakaiensis. I don’t think it overcomes the bigger hurdles by itself, though.
Artificial selection has got to be possible, given we’ve done it to our fruit merely by happenstance over the generations. And our dogs, too.
I wonder if plastic would be more like diamond. We don’t see enzymes breaking down diamond, even though that’s been around for plenty of time.
Natural selection could probably get there if the conditions are right, just as artificial selection could probably force those conditions in a lab. Yet I feel the it’s probably much less likely than was the case with wood.
Wood is a biological material made from molecules that have been sitting in Earth’s biosphere for hundreds of millions of years:
Wood
→ cellulose
→ hemicellulose
→ lignin
→ sugars/aromatic compounds
→ microbial metabolism
Those molecules contain lots of chemically accessible bonds, especially C–O bonds. Plants built them using biological chemistry, so other biological chemistry can, in principle, take them apart.
An enzyme isn’t a tiny animal chewing through plastic. It has to contact a polymer chain, bind it in an active site, chemically cleave a bond, release the products, and repeat.
A plastic can thwart that by being:
hydrophobic + highly crystalline + insoluble + chemically repetitive + physically inaccessible.
There’s no evolutionary law saying organisms must eventually become capable of rapidly consuming any energetically favorable substance.
Evolution has to find a chemically feasible pathway. And even if it does, decomposition might be:
plastic bottle → 150 years
rather than
plastic bottle → three weeks.
And amusingly, we could simply change the plastic. If PET suddenly became unsuitable for decades-long applications because PET-eating microbes became ubiquitous, we’d manufacture polymers resistant to those enzymes, add protective layers, alter crystallinity, or use different polymers.
All and all, I’m doubtful microbes will come to our rescue. Unless we engineer them for the task, that is.
Well, kids might.
records empty Safari
“Live”
adds action afterwards
“Action.”
Huh, I guess that’s one way of putting it.
Not only that, but they believe the active enzymes in the microbe can be optimized and engineered, then mixed into a liquid substrate. Becomes an enzyme-based CO2 filter with the byproduct of Calcium Carbonate, which can be used in concrete. The article talks about filling trucks with these and passing the emissions of coal-fired power plants through them.
I’ve had similar experiences with smoking, believe it or not, on a few things…
Note that I am in no way advising to use any of these for any reason. This is just my anecdotal experience. In my younger years, I was a pretty liberal psychonaut. I would try things to understand it’s mental effects from the first person, never a consistent user and I’ve since left the scene.
Anyway, smoking nicotine for over a decade, after a big enough trip I would have an afterglow that would leave me without nicotine cravings. No cravings at all for up to a week, sometimes.
I always assumed it might be possible to have an afterglow help me get over the worst of the nicotine physical withdrawal (i.e., the first week) while powering through the rest myself — until I’d officially “quit” smoking. Never did this, though. I still vape nicotine daily.