The discovery could result in a recycling solution for millions of tons of plastic bottles made of PET, which currently persists for hundreds of years in the environment, the University of Portsmouth said on its website. Scientists from Britain's University of Portsmouth and the US Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory "tweaked" the structure of the naturally-occurring enzyme after they found that it was helping a bacteria to break down, or digest, plastic used to make bottles. Prof McGeehan, director of the Institute of Biological and Biomedical Sciences in the School of Biological Sciences at Portsmouth, said: “We can all play a significant part in dealing with the plastic problem, but the scientific community who ultimately created these ‘wonder-materials’, must now use all the technology at their disposal to develop real solutions.”

The researchers made the breakthrough when they were examining the structure of a natural enzyme which is thought to have evolved in a waste recycling centre in Japan, allowing a bacterium to degrade plastic as a food source. “Although the improvement is modest, this unanticipated discovery suggests that there is room to further improve these enzymes, moving us closer to a recycling solution for the ever-growing mountain of discarded plastics.”

No doubt, since plastics first became popular in the 1960s, the waste produced by these products has gone from a minor headache to a throbbing migraine. Researchers collaborated with scientists at the Diamond Light Source synchrotron science facility, using an intense beam of X-rays that is 10 billion times brighter than the sun and acts like a microscope to reveal individual atoms. Prof McGeehan said: “The engineering process is much the same as for enzymes currently being used in bio-washing detergents and in the manufacture of biofuels – the technology exists and it’s well within the possibility that in the coming years we will see an industrially viable process to turn PET and potentially other substrates like PEF, PLA, and PBS, back into their original building blocks so that they can be sustainably recycled.”

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An international team researching a plastic-consuming bacterium discovered in 2016 at a Japanese landfill site announce the accidental synthesis of an artificial enzyme that breaks down plastics more efficiently than the bacterium. The team suggest the molecule could be used for environmentally sound plastics disposal.