Clothes and fishing nets that are made of nylon often end up in landfill or dumped in oceans, but a new way to break down the plastic could improve recycling
By Chris Simms
10 February 2025
Clothes are often made of nylon
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A genetically modified bacterium can break down chemicals in nylon and turn them into useful products, which could one day help us recycle clothes and fishing nets.
Nylons, or aliphatic polyamides, are plastics that are widely used due to their high durability and tensile strength, but their recycling rate is below 5 per cent.
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“Production is around 10 million tonnes per year, but at the moment there’s basically no recycling,” says Nick Wierckx at the Jülich Research Centre in Germany. “Even incineration is difficult because you get cyanides when you burn them. The vast majority ends up in landfill.”
Nylon can be dissolved in a strong acid solution, but the mix of chemicals generated isn’t valuable enough to make this commercially useful.
Now, Wierckx and his colleagues have used a combination of genetic engineering and laboratory evolution to create a strain of the bacterium Pseudomonas putida that can break down the various compounds that are produced once nylon has been dissolved and turn them into something useful.