Editorial . . . . . . 

We’ve been attempting to recycle plastic for more than 70 years, but with limited success. Plastic pollution in our lakes, rivers, and oceans is getting worse, along with trillions of microscopic plastic fragments from all the useful and unsettlingly durable things made available by the petrochemical industry. Over the past 60 years, this trash flood has risen enormously. Every year, almost 10 million tonnes of bottles, nets, bags, buckets and food wrappers are tossed into waterways, where they entangle and kill marine life and harm the organs of any animals that ingest them, including perhaps humans. Our ecosystems are negatively impacted by plastic pollution, which is also connected to air pollution. One of the most important environmental challenges that we are currently dealing with is plastic. India produces roughly 3.5 million tonnes of plastic garbage annually, and over the past five years, the amount of plastic waste produced per person has nearly doubled. In 2019–20 and 30.59 lakh tonnes in 2018–19, respectively, more than 34 lakh tonnes of plastic trash were produced. How can we help? In India, it is impossible to manage plastic garbage. A robust infrastructure for sorting and recycling is what we truly need, like in many developed nations like Japan, the USA, and the EU. Simply outlawing single-use plastics may not be enough to make a difference. The plan for managing plastic trash will be heavily influenced by our understanding of recycling, including what it is, who can recycle, what can be recycled, and how cost-effective the process is. Some people think it will never actually work because there are so many different kinds of plastic and they normally can’t be recycled together.

Furthermore, even though it is predicted that the plastics industry would produce three times as much plastic in 2040 as it does now, reprocessing still costs more than making new plastic. Our ecology has ingested plastic to the point where microorganisms have evolved the ability to break it down. Strangely enough, those bugs may now provide a glimmer of hope. Finding chemical enzymes that can quickly break down plastic and recover the molecules that made it, a necessary first step for re-use, is a major obstacle to cost-effective recycling. By examining these bacteria that consume plastic, scientists have found several enzymes that can degrade polymers far more quickly than was previously thought to be feasible. That is a significant improvement over traditional recycling methods, which melt plastic with heat and produce damaged and less valuable material. After demonstrating the novel method, the French company Carbios anticipates using it to recycle 50,000 tonnes of plastic annually very soon. But this is probably just the start. The larger optimism for advancements in recycling chemistry stems from our egregious ignorance of marine microbiology, which is about to change thanks to genetics and computational technologies. Our governments need to make far bolder promises to tax plastic packaging and support packing alternatives that use little to no plastic at all. If we follow these stages, it is not unrealistic to believe that, in 10 or 20 years, with a better understanding of the marine microbiome, researchers may develop a collection of enzymes that can quickly digest the various types of plastics’ industrial output. If it occurs, there might yet be hope for the oceans.