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Scientists have created an enzyme that eats plastic



The world's oceans are filled with plastics more than 5 million pieces of it are floating around being eaten by aquatic animals. Every year more than 100,000 marine animals and seabirds are killed by plastic waste.The accidental discovery of this natural enzyme was made while examining the structure of a bacterium found in the waste dump in Japan.A crew of Japanese researchers described that this bacteria named as Ideonella Sakaiensis could break the molecular bonds of one of the world's most used plastics Polyethylene terephthalate.
The aim of the researchers was to determine how this works and what's the structure of it, but they ended up creating an artificial one better than the natural one.Ideonella Sakaiensis was found outside of a bottle recycling plant, the pathogen appears to have evolved a pair of enzymes.It uses these break down a PET.PETase works by reversing the manufacturing process by reducing polyesters back to their building blocks.Ideonella Sakaiensis can degrade PET in 96 hours you can see it clearly via electron microscope that the PET being degraded.This natural enzyme could result in recycling millions of tonnes of plastic, especially plastic bottles.It is estimated that the world produces over 300 million tonnes of plastic every year.Currently, we are buying 10,00,000 (1 million) plastic bottles per minute world widely and we recycle only 15% of that.

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