Many plastic items are used for only a few minutes or hours, but the material can remain in the environment for decades or even centuries. Researchers are now exploring a different approach: plastics designed to break themselves down when activated.
Known as living plastics, these materials contain dormant microbes capable of degrading the surrounding polymer. In a study published in ACS Applied Polymer Materials, scientists developed a version that fully decomposed in six days without producing microplastics.
Zhuojun Dai, a corresponding author on the paper, explains that "the realization that traditional plastics persist for centuries, while many applications, like packaging, are short-lived, led us to ask: Could we build degradation directly into the material's life cycle?"
Turning Microbes Into a Built-In Disposal System
Some microorganisms naturally produce enzymes that cut long polymer chains into smaller fragments. Since plastics are made from polymers, researchers have been investigating whether these enzymes, or the microbes that produce them, can be embedded directly into plastic materials.
