Latest / How To Protect The Ocean
Can Bacteria Actually Eat Plastic?
Bacteria that eat plastic sounds like the fix everyone's been waiting for, and Andrew gets sent videos about it constantly. So on this solo episode, following Monday's interview with Dr. Anja Brandon of Ocean Conservancy, he goes looking for the real state of the science. The short version: it's promising, it's roughly a decade of real research deep, and it is nowhere close to running at the scale the ocean plastic crisis actually needs.
The bacterium that started this whole field, Ideonella sakaiensis, was discovered breaking down PET plastic in Japan in 2016. A 2025 breakthrough from NREL…
The skinny
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