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Plastic Pollution Degradation Experiment
Summary
Scientists are trying to engineer algae that can "eat" plastic waste, which could one day help shrink the mountains of plastic polluting our oceans and land—plastic that eventually breaks down into microplastics found in our food, water, and even our bodies. So far, the team successfully modified algae cells but hasn't yet confirmed the plastic-degrading gene took hold, so this is an early, unproven step rather than a working solution. It's a hopeful idea worth watching, but there's no evidence yet that it actually reduces plastic pollution.
We are harnessing resources from the natural environment to address a longstanding plastic pollution epidemic in the world. We are attempting to degrade plastic trash with the goal of reducing waste and promoting sustainability. We have introduced a special protein into living algae cells that have the capacity to degrade standard plastics. We intend to use that algae to eat away our pollution problem and hopefully provide a blueprint for more widespread use and research. We have introduced “Agrobacterium” the plastic degradation protein into our algae samples. We have been able to isolate the DNA from the algae sample. We have grown the sample and verified it contains the protein we administered into its DNA. We have tested, measured and observed the algae’s protein interacting with plastic pollution. We are in the process of analyzing the plastic degradation results data as supportive or nonsuppurative to the main goal of waste reduction. We will be documenting and releasing data compiled during the duration of the research experiment for scientific evidence and further refinement of processes. As of March 30, 2026 my group has successfully cloned algae cells and our sample was shown to be negative for the Met/ Pet gene that we introduced and were looking to confirm the presence of. We will continue to attempt to isolate a positive algae clone that includes the plastic eating protein so that we can continue to test the effectiveness of the samples and the impact on our overall goal. We hope one day these methods can be used as a practical way to address the harmful impacts of pollution.