Nature always finds a way. Sometimes in ways we really don't expect.
As you may have heard, humanity’s addiction to plastic is becoming a problem. It’s been well documented for a while now that plastics are killing animals in the oceans and on the land. More recent studies have found that micro-plastic contamination has been found in about 90 precent of bottled drinking water world-wide.
And, just this past week, the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) published a study where they revealed that they had found around 3,500 plastic fragments on the deepest part of the ocean floor, almost 11,000 meters (about 36,000 feet) down in the Mariana Trench!
The problem is two-fold. First, most plastics are single use. Consider the straws that you use at each meal. You literally use it once and then it goes right into the waste stream. It’s not recycled, or otherwise reused, so it becomes garbage in the truest sense of the word.
Second, plastics simply aren’t broken down by the same natural processes that break down organic waste like plants, meat and bone. Even metals like iron will rust and eventually break down if exposed to the elements for a relatively short period of time. And, those natural substances, once they are broken down, are reused by nature, becoming part of the cycle of life.
Plastic however, doesn’t break down naturally. It’s made of long-chain polymers that simply don’t dissolve in water. So, it doesn’t decompose naturally. Well, it does, but the molecular bonds are so strong that natural decomposition can take up to 10,000 years! Different types of plastic have different decomposition rates, of course. One of the shorter ones, for plastic bottles, is still 450 years!
Like I said, it’s a problem…one that scientists all over the world have been trying to solve for a couple of decades now.
Hungry, Hungry Microbes
Fortunately, the relentless process of evolution may have come up with an answer. Given how much plastic there is in the world now, any organism that could eat it would have a real advantage over its competitors.
With that in mind, in 2016, some Japanese researchers started testing bacteria in a bottle recycling plant, and they found that, sure enough, at least one type of bacteria, “Ideonella sakaiensis 201-F6” could actually digest the plastic used to make drinking bottles! It does this by secreting an enzyme that breaks apart the long molecule chains into smaller chunks. The bacteria then uses the carbon that’s freed up as food.
Now, you may have heard in the past that there were already some microbes that could slowly eat plastics. And, that’s true. There were already some bacteria that could coincidentally break down plastics.
The difference is that this little guy seems to have evolved specifically to eat plastic, and it’s more efficient at it than these other bacteria.
That’s exciting, because it means that there may be more bacteria out there that are evolving the same ability. After all, plastic is everywhere now, and, like I said, the ability to use it for food will be a tremendous advantage for any organism that can gain the capability.
(And, as we’ve seen with eyes, evolution is more than happy to solve the same problem over and over again, if it gives an advantage for surviving and passing on genes.)Of course, this is also a little terrifying as well. If evolution happens upon a set of genes that allow an organism to rapidly eat all the plastic in the world, then that’s exactly what it will let loose.
Given the sheer volume of plastic in the world, it’s a pretty good bet that this will happen eventually. If (when?) it does happen, pretty much every bit of our modern world will be at risk.
There’s no easy solution here. We’ve simply become too dependent on plastics to stop using them entirely, and humans are too hard to train to reliably embrace recycling on the scale that’s needed to stop (and maybe reverse) the plastic garbage problems we have.
But you can be sure that if we don’t solve the problem, nature will solve it for us…and probably not in a way we’re going to like.
Steven W. Disbrow is the proprietor of “Improv Chattanooga” on the South Side of town. He also creates e-commerce systems and reads comic books when he’s not on stage acting like a fool.