After graduating with her undergraduate degree in molecular genetics from the University of Toronto in 2016, En Ze Linda Zhong-Johnson celebrated with a trip to Alaska. There, she saw a pristine landscape unlike the plastic-littered shores of the Toronto waterfront. “What I saw up there was so different from what I saw in the city,” Zhong-Johnson says. “I realized there shouldn’t be all this waste floating everywhere, in our water, in our environment. It’s not natural.”
As a trained biologist, Zhong-Johnson began to think about the problem of plastic pollution from a biological perspective. One solution, she thought, could be biological recycling: a process by which living organisms break down materials, using digestion or other metabolic processes to turn these materials into smaller pieces or new compounds. Composting, for example, is a type of biological recycling — microbes in the soil break down discarded food, speeding up the decomposition process. Zhong-Johnson wondered if there were any organisms on Earth that could use the carbon in polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a common plastic used in water bottle and food packaging, as an energy source.
