Clothes are often made of nylon
Anna.spoka/SHUTTERSTOCK
Genetically modified bacteria can decompose nylon’s chemicals and turn into useful products, which can help you recycle clothes and fishing nets someday.
Nylon or aliphatic polyamide is a plastic widely used due to high durability and tensile strength, but the recycling speed is less than 5 %.
“Production is about 10 million tons per year, but now it is basically no recycling.” Nick Wierckx At the Jülich Research Center in Germany. “It is difficult to incinerate because it gets cyan cargo when burning cyan cargo. Most of them end in landfills. ”
Nylon can be dissolved in strong acid solutions, but the mix of chemicals produced is not worth it.
Now Wierckx and his colleagues use a combination of genetic engineering and laboratory evolution to create tensions of bacteria. Pseudomonas Putida When nylon is dissolved, various compounds produced can be disassembled and used to be useful.
Bacteria are already known to reduce oil -based materials. Dissolve oil Leaked. It also shows a promise to break down plastic.
Wierckz and his colleagues were burdened with known P. Putida The KT2440 has provided genes to help metabolize the various chemicals of nylon dissolved. Then we cultured bacteria in the laboratory about this chemical. The researchers continued to modify and cultivate until there is a bacteria that can create useful products such as polyhydrodebutyrate, a biodegradable plastic that is not harmful to living tissues using nylon compounds.
“that Pseudomonas It consumes almost all pre -processed plastics. ”Wierckx says. “What we can measure is that about 80-90 %of them are consumed. But I think it’s an analytical limit, and we actually consume almost everything because we can’t see what’s left there.”
But WierckX says that this technology is needed before it is used commercially. For example, the amount of useful products is still only about 7 %of dry bacteria biomass.
He needs to adjust the chemicals used to adjust the additional deformation of the bacteria and to adjust the supplies to the microorganisms, he said. “Perhaps it will be 10, 20, 30 years until this happens.”
Wierckx doesn’t have to worry that bacteria will melt underwear someday, Wierckx says. “It will not eat all plastic for our clothing and cars. The plastic must be processed in advance so that you can digest plastics. ”
This also means that we can still use bacteria to clean old fishing nets in the sea. However, Wierckx hopes that if you have this recycling process, you can encourage and recycle the future collection of old nets, clothing and automotive engines with heat resistance plastics.
