Eating It Up

It’s estimated that 311 million tonnes of plastics are produced annually worldwide and only 14% is able to be collected for recycling. It’s now believed that researchers have found a microorganism, a bacterium called Ideonella Sakaiensis which is able to completely digest the most commonly used PET plastic. Normally plastics would take 450 years to break down but this Ideonella Sakaiensus as discovered by scientists in Osaka Japan, could break down a small piece of PET plastic in just 6 weeks. A lot more work has to be done at this point but given there is a ray of hope that we may be able to eliminate some of these PET plastics from our environment, and in doing so, save the oceans and our land fill, this could be a major breakthrough.