An Enzyme That Eats Plastic Has Been Developed in the U.S.—is This The end of Landfills?

The PETase enzyme that dissolves a plastic bottle in 24 hours at 122°F could finally make PET circular — so why does the same bottle last 450 years in a landfill? This film traces the 2016 discovery of Ideonella sakaiensis in Sakai, Japan by Kohei Oda and Kenji Miyamoto to the engineered FAST-PETase at the University of Texas at Austin and Carbios. It explains why PET's ester bonds can be hydrolyzed while polyolefins cannot, why only 9% of plastic has ever been recycled, and if enzymatic recycling can scale to 50,000 tons.