Enzyme Breaks Down Waste Plastic in Days, or Even Hours

Why bury plastic in a landfill and wait years for it to degrade when it can break down in days — or even hours? That’s what researchers at the University of Texas at Austin propose in their study of a plastics-eating enzyme. The paper was published on April 27 in the journal Nature. Their variant of an enzyme called PETase can degrade PET even at low temperatures, making the process even greener by reducing energy usage. By creating a machine learning algorithm, the team was able to engineer its mutated version of PETase, called FAST, which stands for functional, active, stable, and tolerant.