In Everest, at the bottom of the sea or in the placenta of pregnant women. The plastic has managed to sneak everywhere and has become one of the great environmental problems of this century. And that is a young material. The era of plastic began in 1907, in the 20s the polyethylene was developed and, since then, new compounds have appeared, from the famous pet of the bottles to the biodegradable plastics. “Let’s put numbers: Every year we produce around 430 million tons of plastics and more than 52 million end up contaminating the environment visible. Of them, Almost a million tons breaks down into tiny particles, Invisible to the human eye, which manage to disperse even in the most remote places on the planet, ”explains Manuel Ferrer Martínez, research professor at the Institute of Catalysis and Petoleoochemistry (ICP) of the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC). Ferrer has taught at the Ramón Areces Foundation a conference -organized with the Spanish Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (SEBBM) – on “how plastic particles can be eliminated using biological nanoparticles.”
Ferre recalled during his presentation that being a while of expedition for the Mediterranean, the captain of the ship in which he was, fond of fishing, believed that he was pulling a tuna when what had actually “chopped” was a bundle of polymers located at great depth. “As you couldn’t see, we thought it was a big tuna,” he said. The added problem of plastics is precisely that, that many of them are not seen. The materials end up degrading and forming microplastics or nanoplastic size less than a micra, “Really very small”, which end anywhere, at the bottom of the sea and on earth, but also in the air and in purified and drinkable waters and from here to the food chain. “The accumulation in the human body has a direct relationship with diseases such as stroke or cancer, in addition to degenerative diseases,” he said and detailed how the reduced size of these polymeric particles cause them to escape the filtering systems of purifying and purification of water.
The sea as inspiration
The same sea that threw that plastic bundle from its guts has given it, to him and the extensive group of scientists who have collaborated in this research (the Complutense University or the Supercomputation Center of Barcelona, among others), the key to improving current recovery and recycling systems and to filter and eliminate PET plastic. The secret is in the anemones and their defensive system. These organisms have “proteins that form pores in the tissue of the animals with which they have contact,” he explained. The natural capacity of these organisms to form pores has served as the basis to investigate and, Applying molecular modeling and artificial intelligence, they have transformed this protein into biological nanoparticles with the ability to cut and degrade plastic material.
Among the advantages of its discovery is that degradation It is achieved at room temperature or the fact that it does not matter the color that the PET has. “In acutal processes, to recycle this material, first it is crushed, then it melts and form a bottle. The problem is that with this recycling method only 37% of the plastic is saved. However, through an enzymatic technology like this we could recycle everything regardless of color, because it could be separated by a conventional chemical process what is the dye part, in quotes, and then the components of the plastic, “he said.
The possibilities are now open to this solution are several. For example, Develop new reactors for treatment plants where these biological nanoparticles are integrated definitively preventing the PET to go to the water and the food chain. For this, the team faces the task of climbing technology to industrialize it. It also opens the door to continue investigating to end other plastic waste such as the usual polyurethane in the automobile or polyester industry that composes 75% of the textile we dress. “If we look at the amount of enzymes that have been reported, which have been characterized and used for plastic degradation, we see that there are as a hundred of them capable of degrading polymers and that are mainly used for PET type plastics” , he concluded.