MANY MINDEDEngineered enzyme breaks tough polycarbonate back into raw ingredients
A 2026 study in Angewandte Chemie International Edition from the University of Manchester, with lead author Henry A. Jones, describes an engineered enzyme that breaks down polycarbonate — a hard plastic used in safety glasses, electronics, and machine parts that is normally difficult to degrade. The enzyme digests the material back into its original chemical building blocks rather than shredding it into something inferior.
The technical hurdle has always been heat. Plastics generally need warming to around 70°C for enzymes to reach their chemical bonds, but proteins are usually destroyed at those temperatures. The team drew on extremophile microbes that live above 100°C, whose proteins have rigid structures and strong internal bonds, and used directed evolution to train the enzyme. The re-engineered version, based on a protein called LCCICCG, depolymerizes polycarbonate with high operational stability at 70°C.
Most recycled plastic today is downcycled into lower-quality products like carpet fibers and garden planters. An enzyme that recovers the original monomers points toward true circularity — the same material remade at full quality rather than degraded a step at a time. That would ease pressure on virgin feedstock and cut waste, touching both the shared environment and the cost of goods.
The honest caveat: this is laboratory research, and the authors describe green enzyme recycling as 'on the horizon' rather than deployed. The piece describing it is a republished field overview by a protein engineer. Applications to textiles, electronics, and other waste streams remain future possibilities. Watch for scale-up and independent replication.
Source: Phys.org