Mangroves are already one of the most extraordinary ecosystems on the planet, but this week’s Net Hero Podcast takes them somewhere I did not expect.
I sat down with Dr Diego Javier Jiménez Avella from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology to talk about microbes living in mangrove forests that may one day help us tackle plastic pollution.
I have been lucky enough to visit mangroves in Mexico and they are incredible places. Trees grow straight out of the water, wildlife thrives around their roots and beneath the surface sits an enormous microbial world that scientists are only beginning to understand.
Diego told me “The microbiomes, the microbial communities that live in mangroves, they can capture CO2, carbon but also the quantity and the type of organic matter that we find in mangroves, in the sediments and in the roots, is amazing. There is a lot of diversity of microbes in the mangroves.”
The really interesting bit is what happens when plastic arrives there.
Mangroves trap huge amounts of waste flowing in from rivers and oceans, including microplastics that can remain buried in sediments for decades.
Diego explained “There are many microplastics that are in the ocean that just arrive to the mangroves, to the sediments and just stay there for decades. So these are a good place to find microbes that can have the potential to break down these polymers in this ecosystem.”
That is where the science gets really cool, many of these organisms cannot even be grown in a laboratory, so researchers identify them through their DNA and then look for enzymes that might be capable of attacking plastic. “There are a lot of microbes that we cannot cultivate. We can only detect them using DNA. We go to the environment, extract the DNA and on that way we can discover them. Every year we discover a new microbe, a new enzyme, so the diversity is enormous.”
His team has already found new organisms and enzymes in mangrove environments and the next stage is combining them.
“We are trying to produce the enzymes,” he said. “We are trying to do a cocktail of enzymes because we have different types of enzyme. We want to make a cocktail and see if we can produce a better process so we have more efficiency of the degradation of PET.”
This is not about pretending microbes will magically eat every piece of plastic on Earth. Diego is clear we still need to use less plastic and design polymers that can actually be reused or degraded, however his hope is simple. “In the future we will see less production of plastic that we cannot degrade and more production of plastic that we can reuse in a more sustainable way.
“That way we avoid this pollution in the ecosystems.”
It is proper science, still developing but potentially hugely important. Listen to the full conversation on the Net Hero Podcast now and please subscribe.
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