Short Look at the Long View

For all its uses, plastic is unfortunately one of our least sustainable materials. Now, scientists at Berkeley Lab have developed a way to engineer bacteria to produce raw materials that can be made into plastics that are completely recyclable.

As useful as plastics are in our everyday life, they’re difficult to recycle, with most ending up in landfill or the environment. Now, researchers in Japan have used a novel catalyst to recycle a common plastic into useful products like fuel and wax.

Scientists investigating more eco-friendly forms of plastic production have made an exciting breakthrough, with the discovery of a bacterial system that generates one of the material's key building blocks through its natural metabolic process.

Recent research has uncovered a range of plastic-degrading enzymes, and a new study has revealed this to be part of a broader trend in which such enzymes are increasing in numbers and diversity in direct response to plastic pollution around the world.

A team has developed a process that turns waste plastic into an adhesive that's more valuable. The goal was to find ways to "upcycle" plastics by putting them to new uses while preserving the properties that made them attractive in the first place.

A new study by scientists in Italy has shone a light on the way lobsters digest plastic particles, finding that their stomach actually grinds them up into tiny fragments that can pose a risk to smaller creatures in the food chain.