Plastic Pollution In Waterways Is Bad And Worsening. But There's A Solution: Genetically-Engineered Bacteria That Eat Plastic.

Nurdles" is the colloquial name for tiny plastic beads used to make plastics. Composed of polyethylene, polypropylene, polystyrene, polyvinyl chloride, and other plastics, nurdles are shipped around the world as raw materials, with hundreds of thousands of tons ending up in our oceans with other plastic debris. The plastic can be ingested by fish and birds.

To date, the volume of nurdles in the oceans is infinitesimally small, leading some skeptics to suggest the sudden surge in reporting on the "nurdle crisis" is overblown, hyped by environmental activists who are leveraging periodic nurdle spills, such as the recent Gallic coast incident, to escalate their anti-plastics campaign. But some scientists disagree, viewing nurdles as the tip of a plastic iceberg threatening marine bio-life. 

Hardly any plastic – just 9% worldwide – ever enters a recycling plant. Plastic debris has now been detected even in remote, largely uninhabited aqua regions of our planet. It’s estimated that more than 171 trillion pieces of plastic are floating in our oceans, many in entangled clumps. At current rates, this number could triple by 2040. The most notorious of these floating dumps is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. a growing plastic patch roughly the size of Great Britain in the North Pacific Ocean between the west coast of North America and the east coast of Japan. Twice the size of Texas, the patch consists of discarded pollution from every continent. 

Until recently, there have been no potential solutions on the table. That is changing, thanks to advances in genetic engineering — but will it be derailed by a labyrinthine government regulatory structure and a lingering hostility toward biotechnology among the very same activist groups that are drawing attention to the marine plastic crisis?

Their findings were eventually published in the journal Science in 2016, precipitating a frenzy of innovative research. Most recently, a team of scientists from the University of Edinburgh have proposed engineering a strain of the bacterium E. coli that would digest the ubiquitous polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastics and make it possible to “upcycle” them into a high-value industrial compound.  

Because the plastic is in such small pieces and pellets, and often meters below the ocean surface, collecting it seems a near-impossible challenge. The National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration’s Marine Debris Program has estimated that it would take 67 ships one year to clean up less than one percent of the mess.