For decades, plastic has been both a marvel and a menace. Lightweight, versatile, and cheap to produce, it revolutionized packaging, manufacturing, and modern life itself. But its durability—the very quality that made it so useful—has turned into a global environmental crisis. Most plastics take centuries to decompose, choking oceans, clogging landfills, and even entering our bodies as microplastics. In response to this mounting disaster, scientists are looking not just at recycling or bans, but at biological allies: enzymes designed to eat plastic.
The idea isn’t entirely new. In 2016, researchers in Japan discovered Ideonella sakaiensis, a bacterium that produces an enzyme called PETase, which can break down polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a common plastic used in water bottles and clothing fibers. What was groundbreaking was not just that it worked, but that it did so far faster than nature’s usual pace. In the lab, PETase could reduce plastic to its basic building blocks within days. This offered the tantalizing possibility of creating a circular plastic economy, where waste is broken back into raw materials and reused indefinitely.
Since then, the race has been on to make these enzymes faster, more efficient, and able to digest more types of plastic. In 2022, a team at the University of Texas at Austin engineered a variant called FAST-PETase, which could degrade plastic at ambient temperatures in as little as 24 hours. Others are working on enzymes capable of breaking down polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP), which are even more common and stubborn. By tweaking protein structures and leveraging AI to design new variants, scientists are building a toolbox of enzymes that could tackle the diversity of plastic waste in our environment.
The promise of plastic-eating enzymes goes beyond waste disposal. In theory, these enzymes could be deployed in recycling facilities to handle plastics that are currently non-recyclable. Today, much of what ends up in the blue bin never actually gets recycled, often due to contamination or mixed materials. Enzymatic recycling could target these “problem plastics” directly, breaking them down to their chemical monomers without requiring high heat or toxic solvents. That means less energy consumption, fewer greenhouse gas emissions, and a chance to recycle materials that would otherwise be destined for landfills or incinerators.
Field applications are also being explored. Some envision large-scale bioreactors that process mountains of plastic waste, while others imagine enzyme sprays or coatings that could break down discarded fishing nets in the ocean or microfibers shed from clothing. There are even speculative ideas about embedding enzymes into plastic at the manufacturing stage, allowing it to self-degrade after a set period. These concepts are still largely experimental, but they hint at a future where plastic is no longer an immortal pollutant.
Of course, there are challenges. Enzymes work best under controlled conditions, and scaling them up to deal with the millions of tons of plastic produced annually is no small feat. They can also be expensive to produce, though advances in biotechnology are lowering costs. There’s the risk of unintended consequences too—what happens if a highly efficient plastic-degrading enzyme escapes into the wild and starts breaking down materials we still need? Such questions require careful testing, containment strategies, and regulations before widespread deployment.
Economics also plays a role in how quickly this technology might spread. Virgin plastic is still cheaper to make than recycled plastic in many markets, and oil companies have a vested interest in keeping production high. Without policy interventions—such as subsidies for enzymatic recycling, higher taxes on virgin plastic, or mandatory recycling quotas—companies may have little incentive to adopt the new technology. Public pressure and consumer demand for sustainable products will be key in shifting that balance.
There’s also the global dimension to consider. Much of the world’s plastic waste ends up in developing countries, where waste management infrastructure is minimal. For plastic-eating enzymes to make a meaningful dent in the crisis, they must be deployable in resource-limited settings—requiring systems that are low-cost, easy to operate, and adaptable to different types of waste streams. Partnerships between wealthy nations, biotech companies, and NGOs could help ensure that the benefits of this innovation aren’t concentrated in just a few countries.
Despite these hurdles, momentum is building. Governments are funding research, companies are exploring commercial applications, and public awareness of the plastic crisis is at an all-time high. In the grand “war on waste,” plastic-eating enzymes represent a potentially transformative weapon—not a silver bullet, but a powerful tool in a broader arsenal that includes reduction, reuse, and rethinking our material culture. The challenge will be integrating these biological solutions into a system that has, for too long, been designed for disposability.
If history has taught us anything, it’s that human ingenuity can rise to meet even the most daunting environmental challenges. Plastic-eating enzymes may one day turn our mountains of waste into raw materials for a cleaner, more sustainable future. But their success will depend on political will, economic incentives, and a global commitment to changing the way we think about—and use—plastic in the first place.