Almost two years ago, we wrote that John McGeehan of the University of Portsmouth had created a mutant enzyme capable of breaking down plastic in a matter of days.
Turns out, they really meant just a matter of hours.
Carbios, a company trying to use the enzymes in industrial-scale recycling to produce food-grade plastics, made the discovery, and they unveiled it this past week in the journal Nature. The group ran through 100,00 micro-organisms that could ideally break down PET plastic, landing on a leaf composting bug discovered back in 2012.
