Plastic trash has reached the world's most remote locations, from the bottom of the Mariana Trench to the summit of Everest. Hundreds of plastic-eating microbes that could help us clean up have been discovered over the past quarter of a century, but there is a long way to go before they can be put to work in natural environments: Microbial digestion of plastic is still slow, requires high temperatures, and only proceeds efficiently in bioreactors. Moreover, most plastic-eating microbes discovered so far can only digest a single kind of plastic.
One solution would be to combine different microbes to tackle plastic pollution as a team. This allows them to share tasks, compensate for each other's weaknesses, and continue working even when environmental conditions change.
Now, scientists in Germany have discovered such a synergistic "consortium" of plastic-eating bacteria, which can eat phthalate esters (PAEs)—plasticizers that are often found in building materials, food packages, and personal care products, but have been implicated in hormonal, metabolic, and developmental disorders and some cancers. The results are published in Frontiers in Microbiology.
