Polymer recycling using microbes

Plastics are globally consumed at a pace of some 311 million tons per year with 90% having a petroleum origin. Remarkable quantities of packaging plastics are recycled though low. Packaging is the dominating application for these plastics. As an example, beverage bottles constitutes less than 15% of recycle collection. Generally, plastics degrade in the environment very slowly resulting in major environmental concerns for the proper and sustainable recycling and disposition of such massive amounts of these rather durable organic polymers. There is an increasing collection of technologies and new material sources under development that could provide solutions to current disposal problems of plastics. …