Can Bacteria Actually Eat Plastic?

0:00If you listen to the episode yesterday, we had Onya Branden, Dr. Onya Branden, who talked about microfibers, and in the interview, she actually made a joke about the future of having a machine in your apartment that can break down all your plastics and you can reuse the materials for something else. Then she kind of laughed at herself for even thinking that. But it kind of got me thinking, it's like I get a lot of these videos or things like that from friends who are like, okay, Andrews, is there such thing as bacteria eating plastic? And can we use this as an innovative way to clean up our plastic habits and clean up the plastics to recycle them to something better? And I was like, I don't know, well, let's look. I know there's times where yes, that's happened, but we don't know at the scale. And can we actually run that on a full scale like plants that are actually able to do this, like in a warehouse or manufacturing plants that can actually break down bacteria using bacteria eating plastic or is there another way that we can do this where we can actually get ahead of this plastic pollution

1:02epidemic that we're in? And you know what, we're gonna find that out on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean Podcast because it's where you find out all ocean news, new innovative ways of helping protect the ocean as well as just getting updates on what's happening in the ocean. That's what we do here today. So if you like that kind of information, you're new here, welcome. We've been doing this since 2015 and we'd love for you to join the community. So all you have to do is just follow this podcast, on your favorite podcast after you listen to it right now and you'll get more information Monday to Friday and it'll be a lot of fun. We do an interview at the beginning of the week, sometimes we at the end of the week, we're gonna switch it to the beginning of the week and then we're gonna do solo episodes to break down that interview just exactly what we're doing today. So in that interview yesterday, if you had a chance, after this episode, go listen to that interview yesterday, it should be the episode right before this. Ony had said like, said, you know, and I think it's worth restating kind of like what she claimed here. It's like plastic degrading bacteria research. It's still, it's roughly a decade old, but it still hasn't come close to the meaningful at scale business type that we really need.

2:04And you know, it's more realistic as a complement to recycling or waste of our treatment than a clean up miracle. So like right now, right off the bat, I would say no. Don't consider this our way out. It's not even close to what we need right now and we're gonna break that down as to why in more detail. Now, I asked her, you know, why this is happening? And I said, like, are we creating a technology for a problem that we don't need to solve? Is that essentially what is coming up here? And she compared, like, you know, it over-promised tech fixes to something like ocean cleanup project. If you were on ocean decoded live on my YouTube, you can see how I talked about the ocean cleanup and how that was a technology that we didn't really need. That actually made it worse in the ocean than better. And that, like these pitches, you know, for fast fixes, for something that really needs to be stopped at the source is just distractions, right? It's just like when a politician, when they're trying to answer a question and they refer to something different

3:04just to get out of answering that question because they know people aren't gonna like the question, right? Now, Anu was being pretty modest of what was actually, like the landscape that we're here, right? And going into what the plastic eating bacteria landscape was like. And so, you know, today we're gonna talk about that. It's actually a pretty messy one. We talk about the bacteria question, whether it's actually already to go kind of things. So let's go there because I think that's what's really important here. Now, the first thing to let you know is like, the bacteria that started this whole field is called idea nela secianis. Okay, secianis is sorry. We, and it was discovered breaking down the PET plastics in Japan back in 2016. It was actually peer-reviewed, published in, published paper in science. Now, in 2025, the researcher is at NRL UMass Lowell and the University of Port Smell has engineered an improved version of that what we call PET A's enzyme that made enzymatic PET recycling dramatically cheaper. And the, there's less acid and base chemical use

4:05is down 99%. Running the costs is down 70% and the energy use is down 65%. And they're modeled costs like the enzyme recycled PET, about $1.51 per kilogram, this US. And it actually undercuts the, the virgin plastic by, by about 30, almost 40 cents at $1.87 per kilogram. So it's cheaper, it's, uses less energy. It, the costs are cheaper to go down and of course the chemical use is down 99%, which is all, it's all great. And this is like a, you know, a government and university source. This is credible as this space gets. The catch is though, and it's the same thing on you said, it's like this is still just in a development phase. It's not in a commercial scale yet. No firm deployment date has happened so far. And it really depends entirely, you know, someone actually investing to build the first US plant. So like the, it's there, it's not commercialized yet. It's not a scale work we use, but it's still,

5:05you know, there's a possibility for it to happen. Not saying that it'll never happen, there's a possibility for it to happen. Now, you know, I hate to say it on just skepticism as a scientist, like we all do. Like this is not near where we are. So that makes sense, right? Even the best lab breakthrough in the space is still lab only and it's still only happening. So we still have a lot of stuff that needs to go on. Now there are companies who are trying to do this. They're trying to do use this enzymatic PET recycling. One company is a French company, a carburetor, a calfbios, I think is how you pronounce it. They built an entire business around this enzymatic PET recycling. And an industrial scale, which makes it probably the best real world test of whether this technology can leave the lab. And I'll be honest, it's still early, right? So I don't want to down this company because, you know, everything is early in this technology. And like this is really the first that I see from the, the looking around at research that I've been able to do. This is the first company that I've seen that actually wants to

6:06bring it to that industrial scale. So, so let's give it some, some grace in terms of what is happening, of course. But like their flagship in plant in Longuvel, Longuvel France is not operational yet. The construction was delayed six to nine months due to financial problems or financing problems. And then the cash reserves dropped from 112 million euros in November 2004 to 72 million euros in June 2025. And they cut about 40% of the workforce in January 2025. So as you can see, the space is still quite volatile. There's a lot of money involved. You're looking at 122 million euros and 72 million euros. That's a lot of money in this space. So people are serious about this stuff. They've just haven't been able to get the industry up and running in this warehouse up and running and this technology at a scale. Now, according to sources, they've pivoted towards Asia. A new joint venture with a Chinese PET producer,

7:07Wang Ke, new materials, targeted about 50,000 toned plant in Xiijang in China. The construction is planned for early 2026, commission targeted for about early 2027. But I can't verify that. So the timeline is still moving fast and that can change. But there's really no, like there's no real solidification in this, like a shareholder group that was from Carbios, still is raising concerns about the deal with China, like the Chinese company. And Carbios has denied the allegations that there is any kind of concerns to be worried about. And it filed the legal complaint again, calling it a destabilization campaign. So again, there's still a lot of stuff. There's nothing I can really verify in the source that I got it from here, but this is all in motion. But the biggest takeaway here is like, even the most promising enzymatic recycling company in the world still can't get one plant running.

8:07So we are still not there. It's not to say that it'll happen. It's just a question, really, is like how far are we from this at scale? So there are people interested, and it could happen to move it forward, but we're not sure what's going to happen with this at this point. Now the other thing, this plastic eating tech, it's kind of like, it's a little bit controversial, right? Or the other thing that people call plastic eating tech. I think that's the difference, right? We have this bacteria that eats plastic, like the PET plastic, but then we have others that they call it, they call it plastic eating, but is it really plastic eating? Right? So I want you to know that the other quote unquote plastic eating tech is chemical recycling, right? It's called pyrolysis. And it's not biological. It's a chemical way of doing it. It's basically breaking down the plastic with extreme heat that makes it go back into oil or gas. So you got to remember that plastic is a petroleum product. So it is made from petroleum products. It's made from oil and gas. So if you heat it, you can get oil from it.

9:09How clean that is to really reuse as gas or oil or anything like that? I don't know, but people are doing this. And it's also like people here, like new plastic recycling technology in the news, that's what people are picturing. A lot of the time, right? It's not the bacteria eating thing, because that's still not there as we as we talked about, right? Now it's it's it's pitched as a solution for plastics, but that can't be mechanically recycled, right? It's just broken down into this this oil and gas to kind of material. So it's not really there. Now an advocacy group named Beyond Plastics, they label this as their like advocacy. So I think it's not peer review. This is advocacy. These facilities, they say these facilities currently handle under 1% of the US plastic waste. One example, the free point facility in Ohio takes in 170 million pounds of plastic and produces only 26 million pounds of new plastic. So it's not really recycling.

10:11And the rest becomes a byproduct. So the US EPA actually regulates pyrolysis as incineration, not recycling. And the EU exclusive from its recycling definitions outright, largely because most output becomes fuel to burn and not new plastic, right? So it's not recycling. It's more of just breaking it down back into its original form, which is less than what it was. And it's a way, it's something that could be done. But the same advocacy source claims like multiple pyrolysis facilities have shut down or gone bankrupt while running at a fraction of state of capacity and that the emissions of these plants can run far higher than making virgin plastic. So again, you're using a high heat to break down this this this these chemicals like this, this basically a chemical product into oil and gas. The rest become byproduct, but there's a lot of chemicals, nasty chemicals in there, where's all that going? How is it being treated? There's a lot of questions there that I haven't answered in this episode, but it kind of goes beyond scope,

11:11but it can be dangerous, right? But this is, you know, it's not peer reviewed. This is what advocacy organizations are saying. So I want to make sure that I state that in the industry, you know, disputes this type of framing. But when you really look at it, it is melting down with using high heat. So with high heat comes energy use comes this probably not the better than the bacteria eating plastic, but you know, it is something that, you know, that can that can take away some of the plastic, right? Now the thing is here is we ask, like when people send me these videos like, hey, Andrew, can we actually do this? Is this something that's being done on a regular basis? The thing is like when we look at the plastic pollution problem that we have in the ocean, this is not even coming close to what we can do, right? And not saying that it's not getting there, we always have to go through our steps to get there to use the technology to get there. But it's not the biggest thing that we can do right now, right? The most scientifically credible path, the enzymatic recycling of the bacteria recycling,

12:14you know, it might finally reach like a cost that's, that has like perid parity with the virgin plastic on paper. But the company that's the first along is still, you know, is building at a real scale is still can't put a get a full, like one plant fully running, right? And the chemical recycling has more facilities announced, but the critics say most of what it comes out of it, at the other end isn't just new, it's not new plastic at all and plastic could cause more problems for climate change, not helping the situation as well, right? So look, we are, are we creating a technology for a problem we don't need to resolve? You know, not maybe, maybe, you know, but I think it reinforces the point that, hey, you know, reduction, reuse, reduce, and just like refuse, you know, is really where we get furthest with plastic, you know, and so we don't make it in the first place. And that is still waiting on a fix, that's a big thing.

13:16And when we talk about plastic, there's plastics in many forms, when we talk about the plastics that we all think of the hard plastic, things like the single-use plastics are the ones that we don't need to use. It's gonna come from not only individuals, but really government sort of leadership on this to ban single-use plastics from being used, because they are not good for the environment and the amount of plastics that are getting into the ocean, we can't clean up as much as we use. Like even if we have all the boats along, all the rivers in the world, that'll be almost an impossible feat to even get to. But we need to just stop it at the source. We need to stop using single-use plastics, we need to stop getting it. That will reduce a huge amount and that needs government leadership. Yes, we can reduce the use of that single-use plastics and we're starting to do that. But sometimes they cause other problems, you never know, but the fact of the matter is, is that we are in a crisis right now with plastic pollution. It is everywhere. It is in our lungs.

14:16It is in the air. It is in the water. It is everywhere. And we need to reduce it quickly or we are going to start seeing it. The effect, we're already starting to see the effects in our own health. But we're going to see it for generations and generations on top of that. So we're going to talk about plastic all this week. And we're really going to be focusing in next episode on following an order a source of plastic that you wouldn't necessarily think about. And that's microfibers that Anne, you talked about on her interview yesterday. We're going to go from the washing machine all the way into the ocean on tomorrow's episode. So don't miss that episode. So if you want to, if you don't want to miss it, just hit that follow button. If you haven't done already, it'll be right in your feed tomorrow morning. But I want to thank you so much. That's the end of this episode. If you have any questions or comments, if you're listening to this on Spotify, that allows you to have comments, God, I wish podcasting platforms would allow more comments. Please hit me up with a comment. I'd love to be able to hear what you have to say because it's the beginning of a conversation. And I want to hear what you have to say. Do you know more about this type of product or plastic eating bacteria that you might have

15:17some more insights on? Let me know. Hit me up either on Spotify comments or you can hit me up on a DM Instagram TikTok, Facebook, wherever you see me or even LinkedIn, actually probably the best way to get a hold of me. But I want to thank you. That's it for today's episode. I want to thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. Have a great day. We'll talk to you tomorrow and happy conservation.