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Closing the recycling circle

Nature Biotechnology volume 38, pages 665–668 (2020)Cite this article

Capturing the value back from plastic waste has been the holy grail of recyclers. Biotechnology is taking us closer to a solution.

What preceded this accomplishment was decades of work by the research community scouring landfills for microbes that could live on plastic, likely because they have enzymatic pathways capable of metabolizing these xenobiotics. Reports of such bacteria date at least as far back as the 1990s. This is the easy part. Going from there to an activity that works efficiently and on a large scale is not.

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Fig. 1: The demand for plastic resins in Europe during 2017 as a percentage of total plastic demand.
Fig. 2: Structure of PETase from I. sakaiensis.

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  1. Senior Editor, Nature Biotechnology https://www.nature.com/nbt/

    Laura DeFrancesco

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  1. Laura DeFrancesco
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DeFrancesco, L. Closing the recycling circle. Nat Biotechnol 38, 665–668 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-020-0541-0

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