How long does it take for plastic to degrade?

If your child asked you How long does it take for plastic to degrade in the environment?until now the answer would have been devastating. This widely used material is not compostable or biodegradable and it takes decades if not centuries for it to degrade in nature. From today, however, we can give a better answer to our children.

In fact, a new system has been developed that uses a technology that allows plastic to degrade more quickly. We are no longer talking about centuries, decades, years or even months. But simply days. A truly revolutionary discovery, which we want to tell you about as good news of the day. Because when we talk about the environment, we know how much we need good news and no longer bad news.

How long does it take for plastic to decompose in nature?

Use less plastic and recycle it correctly is essential, to avoid polluting the planet with waste that takes a long time to decompose in the environment. According to estimates recently released, in fact, a plastic bottle would need 450 years to decompose in nature. Four and a half centuries. And if we consider the amount of containers of this type that we use every day, we can imagine how present and pressing the problem is. In a century, the Earth could be a desolate land covered in plastic bottles.

The same fate befalls disposable plastic cups and plates, which take 450 years to break down. Luckily, a law has banned them. Things are worse for a plastic coffee capsule, which takes 500 years, as well as a toothbrush. Things are also bad for plastic straws, which should be abolished from our habits, it takes 200 years for them to disappear into the environment. A plastic bag takes 20 years and there are already biodegradable and compostable ones that we can use.

The solution to make the planet breathe is simple. Use less plastic, recycle and hope that research discovers useful solutions to make the Earth increasingly plastic free. Solutions like the one found by some American researchers.

Today, plastic can decompose in just a few days

If until now plastic needed a long time to decompose, here is a discovery by some scholars that gives hope for the future of the planet. A research group from the University of Austin, Texas, has in fact created an enzyme that can decompose plastic within a few days and not decades or centuries as happened before.

The study, published in the Nature scientific magazine in May 2022, reveals surprising results, made possible by the use of machine learning that determined mutations to create a protein that could act rapidly to separate the elements that make up polyethylene terephthalate (PET). Through a depolymerization process, a catalyst was able to separate the essential components of PET plastic into the original monomers that can then be recoupled to form virgin plastic and used to convert them into other products.

The enzyme that breaks down plastic in 7 days

Hal Alperprofessor of Chemical Engineering and one of the authors of the study, explains that today it is possible to break down plastic into its starting monomers. And that is the work done by the enzyme they created, which brings the material back to its original state, so as to have recycled plastic from scratch without resorting to oil to create new plastic.

The enzyme in question is called FAST-PETase, an acronym that stands for “Functional, active, stable, and tolerant PETase.”

According to the researcher, there are many advantages to the plastic recycling process: “If you have to melt the plastic and then reshape it, the material loses integrity with each recycling cycle. In this case, however, if you can chemically depolymerize and then repolymerize, you are essentially producing virgin PET every time.”.

Many other studies had led to the discovery of enzymes useful for breaking down plastic, but many only worked in their specific environments, having strong limitations related to temperature, pH and other factors that made them unsuitable for use, for example, in recycling centers.

Their enzyme, however, can break down 51 types of PET under different conditions, thus overcoming the limitations of its predecessors.

How the FAST-PETase Enzyme Was Discovered

Its creation was possible thanks to an algorithm that worked on 19 thousand protein structures, which researchers taught to predict the positions of amino acids in structures not optimized for the original environment. They also used specific formulas to rearrange existing amino acids in new positions, finding the best combinations. The final one is able to show 2.4 times more activity than any other enzyme at 40°. But even in other conditions it has always surpassed existing enzymes.

An enzyme to fight plastic pollution in the world

The team of researchers hopes that this study can bring many benefits to the planet, to solve an increasingly pressing problem such as that ofplastic pollution. The fact that the enzyme can work optimally with a whole series of different factors already gives us hope, but now we need to take a further step. This discovery must be distributed and economically accessible in every corner of the planet, even the most remote. Because we know that plastics and microplastics have reached even very distant areas of our Earth, pristine territories that are now contaminated by human habits that the globe no longer tolerates.

Further tests will need to be done on different types of PET that end up in landfills around the world or in plastic recycling bins. If it works with each of the models taken as a reference, the researchers are convinced that it would be the definitive solution to the problem of disposing of billions of tons of plastic waste that we continually pour into the environment.