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Review of key issues and potential strategies in bio-degradation of polyolefins
Summary
This review examines the challenges of biodegrading polyolefins — the most widely used plastics — highlighting the limited number of known degrading enzymes, their poor efficiency, and incomplete understanding of their catalytic mechanisms, with incomplete degradation itself producing microplastics. The review argues that multienzyme systems and better mechanistic understanding are needed before biological polyolefin degradation can become a practical waste management tool.
Polyolefins are the most widely used plastic product and a major contributor to white pollution. Currently, studies on polyolefin degradation systems are mainly focused on microorganisms and some redox enzymes, and there is a serious black-box phenomenon. The use of polyolefin-degrading enzymes is limited because of the small number of enzymes; in addition, the catalytic efficiency of these enzymes is poor and their catalytic mechanism is unclear, which leads to the incomplete degradation of polyolefins to produce microplastics. In this review, three questions are addressed: the generation and degradation of action targets that promote the degradation of polyolefins, the different modes by which enzymes bind substrates and their application scenarios, and possible multienzyme systems in a unified system. This review will be valuable for mining or modifying polyolefin degradation enzymes and constructing polyolefins degradation systems and may provide novel ideas and opportunities for polyolefin degradation.