Transcript: The Sci-Fi Reality of Plastic Eating Bacteria
CLARICE: Good morning, everybody. And welcome to this week’s episode of Environmentally Speaking.
MARISA: Hi, everybody. I’m Marisa Desautel, an environmental attorney in Rhode Island.
CLARICE: And I’m Clarice, coming in with questions, topics. And today we’re going to be talking about something a little sci-fi.
MARISA: Yeah. This is a cool one.
CLARICE: Yeah.
MARISA: I don’t remember who suggested it or how it came before us.
CLARICE: You did. Take credit.
MARISA: Yeah, you’re right. It is kind of sci-fi.
CLARICE: Yeah.
MARISA: And it’s positive, so I’m going to let you do the intro because, you know, this is my area of discomfort.
CLARICE: So we are talking about this week plastic-eating bacteria. There are scientists who have developed a self-digesting plastic which can speed up plastic’s decomposition and overall lessen its waste over the years. So weird.
MARISA: It is weird because the more that I read about this particular topic the more I learned, shocking. But the plastic-eating bacteria already existed in nature. This is not a bioengineered bacteria.
CLARICE: Yeah.
MARISA: It existed in nature. It was discovered in 2001 by a group of Japanese scientists, but the results of their study was never published because plastic was not as much of an issue in 2001 as it became. So the study about the bacteria that was discovered actually in what is a landfill in Japan didn’t get published until, I think, 2006 or 2016. But in any event, they did all this research and it didn’t become a published article for peer review until much later.
CLARICE: Man, if I was one of those scientists, I would be a little peeved. Like the idea that you found or are now researching something so cool and everybody’s like, no, we actually don’t need it yet.
MARISA: Yeah. 2016.
CLARICE: All of that work.
MARISA: The publication came out in 2016 and the group of scientists from Japan were with the Kyoto Institute of Technology led by a scientist named Kohei Oda, O-d-a. They were not actually searching for this particular bacteria. They were looking for something that might soften synthetic fabrics like a polyester and they found this — it’s disgusting, but they found this slimy film of bacteria that had been chewing through plastic bottles, toys, and other stuff in this Japanese landfill.
[0:03:19] CLARICE: Wow. That’s so cool. So when they’re taking this discovery of these — and essentially they’re being called spores. I don’t know if that matters particularly for somebody who doesn’t know a ton about science. I’m just going to say spores and for those who do care now you know it’s a spore. The next evolution is scientists are looking at the idea of combining the polyurethane with spores and they’re melting them together at obviously a high, high temperature to create the idea of a plastic that will eventually self-digest.
MARISA: So, yes. Excellent segue. That is a different kind of bacteria, I think —
CLARICE: Oh, okay.
MARISA: — that has grown out of this initial finding from 2001. So it’s a big enough area of science that you’ve got multiple institutes studying it and it’s my understanding that the initial bacteria that was found in Japan, since the study was published in 2016 it’s become a bigger issue because of things like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch —
CLARICE: Yeah.
MARISA: — and landfills around the globe filling up. So we got to figure out what we’re doing here with recycling and only something like nine percent — I forget exactly, but only something like nine percent of the world’s plastic is actually recycled. The rest of it just ends up in the landfill or in our oceans. So since 2016 the scientific community has really run with the naturally occurring bacteria that was discovered and they’re now bioengineering and trying to make that mutate essentially to make the plastic-eating process go faster.
CLARICE: Yeah. It’s super cool and I would love to see as scientists, you know, sort of play with this and experiment with this concept more the idea of projecting the lifespan of whatever that item is. Like if you’re going to make a plastic bottle with this self-digesting, you know, quality to it, how long is it going to last. So what is its impact short term. What is its impact long term. So I think that’s going to be a cool piece of this study of, you know, you can have this container for maybe five years and then it will just eat itself. So I guess no more like expired condiments in the fridge because eventually the bottle will just eat itself. This is where my thought went.
[0:06:09] MARISA: I mean, fantastic but, yeah, you’re right. I didn’t even think about that.
CLARICE: I mean, that’s a good motivator to keep your fridge cleaned. No more like four-year-old ranch dressing. It’s got to go.
MARISA: My ten-year-old stepdaughter — this just came up recently. We were making ice cream sundaes and she looked at a container of caramel that I had and said, is this caramel expired. And, I mean, it was, but it was — you know, got put in my place by a ten-year-old. But, yeah, you’re right. I mean, it didn’t occur to me that I would have caramel lingering in the house for so long that it would become expired. Kids eat sugar like it’s going out of style. So, yeah, that’s a really good point.
CLARICE: So that was the first thing I thought of was how are they going to project the expiration dates on this. Is this something where the spores are dormant for a certain amount of time. Are they eating, but they’re eating at such a slow rate you won’t notice any sort of shift in the bottles or a container’s integrity until a certain amount of point — or until a certain amount of years. But overall I just think it’s such a cool idea that with this idea those plastic pieces won’t exist. And then like you said with the Great Pacific — I call it the Great Pacific trash heap.
MARISA: Same thing.
CLARICE: Yeah.
MARISA: Same thing.
CLARICE: I’m wondering if it’s an option to introduce those spores to that environment. I don’t know how they react to saltwater, if that’s something that they can sustain in or how that works.
MARISA: Good point.
CLARICE: But if they are something that can thrive and live in saltwater, it would be great to just sort of sprinkle them. I’m imagining like sprinkling, you know, salt over the top of it and just watching the spores have a fantastic meal.
MARISA: It seems like there’s a few different strains of bacterium that are being study and it also appears that this branch of science is sort of taking off in terms of new discoveries —
CLARICE: Yeah.
MARISA: — becoming part of the mainstream. There’s a strain of bacteria called pseudomonas which has existed forever, but scientists have discovered that it can break down polyurethane. That’s a really difficult type of plastic to recycle or destroy or incinerate. I believe the first bacteria that was found in Japan was eating that plastic called PET and I’m not even going to try to remember what that stands for. But this is exciting because now they’re finding bacteria that will eat different kinds of plastics, so you might have a ketchup bottle with pseudomonas and you might have a —
[0:09:15] CLARICE: And the lid might be the other plastic.
MARISA: Yeah. For sure. And they’re organic bacteria, so the issues of having them be pervasive in the environment is not an issue because they’re organic, so they belong.
CLARICE: They’re in that environment already.
MARISA: And last year Scandinavian scientists found a form of lake bacteria, so still not saltwater but — I don’t think — that was growing on the surfaces of plastic bags in a happier manner than on leaves and twigs.
CLARICE: Oh, that’s weird. I just had this thought of like is giving this bacteria like giving a little kid a cupcake? Is it like, yeah, I know I’m supposed to eat the apple, but I’m not happy about it, but now that I have the plastic I’m having the best day ever.
MARISA: Yes. But reverse that because these bacteria can’t eat sugar, but what they do is they get to the complex compound itself and they’ll go in and work at a particular bond until they break it.
CLARICE: That’s so cool.
MARISA: And it’s not sugar.
CLARICE: Yeah.
MARISA: It’s just plastic and different types of plastic. So it appears that it’s not yet at a point where mass commercial application is going to be a thing, but there is hope that with continuing study and bioengineering and scientists doing their thing that we might have a natural solution to our plastics problem.
CLARICE: Very cool. I will say the — you sent a great article from the BBC and we’ll link that in the show notes. What I really appreciated at the end of it was one of the scientists who was interviewed — oh, I’m sorry. I believe he’s a scientist, but his title on this article is professor. So professor Stephen Fletcher also made sure to note that even though there is this potential discovery for a way to reduce the plastic waste that we’ve created it shouldn’t be used as a way of saying, well, we have a way to clean it up, so let’s continue to use plastic and not worry about the waste.
MARISA: Yeah. That’s a good point.
CLARICE: It should be used in conjunction with mindful consumption, proper recycling because we can’t — think about that Pacific trash heap. It’s ginormous. We can’t expect this to fix everything, so it’s a way to work with our additional efforts which I thought was a very smart way to end this piece.
[0:12:10] MARISA: Yeah. And the initiatives at the state level are to get Americans off of their reliance on single-use plastic bottles or the latest —
CLARICE: Even the shopping bags.
MARISA: — fad now are these Stanley cups that everyone has. I want to just drive into the Atlanta Ocean when I see these because you can’t recycle them and they’re just going to end up in the landfill, so let’s all stop acting like they’re environmentally protective. So, yeah, you’re right that we’ve got to figure out a new way to consume and it can’t be such a throwaway society.
CLARICE: Yeah. I thought this was really cool. I’d love to see where this goes. Hopefully it doesn’t take, you know, 15 more years between the first discovery and the next advancement. And it sounds like it won’t, so I’m excited to see how this keeps going.
MARISA: Yeah. That’s all I have.
CLARICE: Nice.
MARISA: We’re ending positively.
CLARICE: All right. If we’re going to end on a positive note, we’re just going to end it right now.
MARISA: Okay.
CLARICE: Thank you so much, everybody. If you have any questions, comments, things you want to add, reactions about this new discovery, you can reach out to us. We’re on the socials at Desautel Browning Law on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. If you want to send us an e-mail, you can e-mail Marisa at —
MARISA: Marisa — M-a-r-i-s-a —info@DesautelBrowning.com.
CLARICE: Awesome.
