Deconstructed Plastic Substrate Preferences of Microbial Populations from the Natural Environment
Lindsay Putman, Laura G. Schaerer, Ruochen Wu, Daniel Kulas, Ali Zolghadr, Rebecca G. Ong, David R. Shonnard, Stephen M. Techtmann
Abstract
The durability and impermeable nature of plastics have made them a popular material for numerous applications, but these same qualities make plastics difficult to dispose of, resulting in massive amounts of accumulated plastic waste in landfills and the natural environment. Since plastic use and disposal are projected to increase in the future, novel methods to effectively break down and dispose of current and future plastic waste are desperately needed. We show that the products of chemical deconstruction or pyrolysis of plastic can successfully sustain the growth of low-diversity microbial communities. These communities were enriched from multiple environmental sources and are capable of degrading complex xenobiotic carbon compounds. This study demonstrates that tandem chemical and biological processing can be used to degrade multiple types of plastics over a relatively short period of time and may be a future avenue for the mitigation of rapidly accumulating plastic waste.