Munch — The Room

An organism that has been shown to break out of captivity by eating through plastic. In a real-life example akin to the imaginings of a 1950s science-fiction B movie.

I remember a day in my chemistry class back in the 1970s when my chemistry teacher was discussing plastics, a subject about which he was quite passionate. One particular thing he mentioned raised a question in my mind and, although I cannot recall his exact words, the essential point was that “plastics rot”.

Ever since, I have wondered whether this was a pure assumption and far from the truth. My opinion was that plastics do not “rot”, they simply dry out, become brittle, and crumble into ever smaller pieces; the microplastics of which we hear so much about nowadays.

In online discussions I have seen people ask (I paraphrase):

“What creature, over these millions of years, has ever had the chance to evolve to digest these new materials?”
“Of course, these plastics do not ‘rot’”.

Ideonella sakaiensis, enter stage left…

Kohei Oda, a Japanese microbiologist and an emeritus professor at the Kyoto Institute of Technology, and his team including Kenji Miyamoto of Keio University, discovered this bacterium in 2016 in a soil sample from around a plastic recycling plant at Sakai, near Osaka, in Japan (Yoshida et al., 2016).

This bacterium’s claim to fame is that it eats polyethylene terephthalate (PET) which is used to make plastic bottles and other containers, the plastic being recycled at the plant. Fascinating, because it must have evolved the enzymes it uses over a matter of years - a few decades at most.

However, the story does not end there.

As it transpires, teams from the University of Portsmouth in the UK, and the US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), engineered an enzyme (the same one?) to digest the same plastic. Their work was published in ‘Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences’ (PNAS) (University of Portsmouth, 2018).

Now imagine not just a bacterium or an enzyme that could be used to “digest” plastic being developed, but an organism that has been shown to break out of captivity by eating through plastic. In a real-life example akin to the imaginings of a 1950s science-fiction B movie, the BBC’s Emma Woollacott reported on Samantha Jenkins - a lead bio-engineer at the company Biohm - whose captive fungus literally ate its way through the plastic sponge holding it captive (BBC News, 2021).

The referenced BBC article carries other really impressive developments and is a recommended read.

Well, in the words of Professor Ian Malcolm from ‘Jurassic Park’, perhaps “nature is finding a way”?

References

BBC News. (2021). The fungus and bacteria tackling plastic waste. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-57733178 [Accessed 22 May 2025].

University of Portsmouth. (2018). Engineering a plastic-eating enzyme. Available at: https://www.port.ac.uk/news-events-and-blogs/news/engineering-a-plastic-eating-enzyme [Accessed 22 May 2025].

Yoshida S, Hiraga K, Takehana T, Taniguchi I, Yamaji H, Maeda Y, et al., 2016. A bacterium that degrades and assimilates poly(ethylene terephthalate). Science. 351 (6278): 1196–1199. Bibcode:2016Sci...351.1196Y. doi:10.1126/science.aad6359. PMID 26965627. S2CID 31146235.