The world is still reeling after China,... which once imported millions of tons of foreign plastic,... recently banned waste shipments from its shores.
Fortunately,... help may be on the way.
A group of scientists in Britain and the U.S. say they might've found a way to deal with the world's mounting problem with plastic waste.
They've tweaked a plastic-eating enzyme that could possibly munch its way through our discarded bottles.
Kim Ji-yeon reports.
Researchers from Britain's University of Portsmouth and the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory have engineered an enzyme that's able to digest a form of plastic called PET used in the production of plastic bottles.
They've taken the enzyme and fired powerful x-rays at its beamline to be able to see its 3D structure.
The technique helped them understand how the protein worked.
"So what we've done is using the structure that we solved here we've tweaked the enzyme. We actually thought we were making the enzyme slower by changing a few amino acids but actually we've made it faster. That's really exciting because that means that there's potential to optimize the enzyme even further."
Improving the enzyme's plastic-eating abilities to work faster means there's potential to use the protein on an industrial scale.
At the moment plastics aren't really recycled.
They either end up in landfills or are burned,... which pumps a lot of CO2 and various nasty chemical by-products into the air.
"Basically we can just make gallons of powered enzyme and then pour it into a vat of plastic. This is what we're aiming to do. So just in the same way that washing power detergents were developed and made more stable, being able to work at high temperature or low temperatures, we're going to do the same with this enzyme."
The team's findings were published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.
Kim Ji-yeon, Arirang News.
