Where I grew up, there were still Eskimo families that would use every single part of a hunted animal for something: eat the meat, fermenting some for storage; baleen from a whale to make sleds; furs from a caribou for boots; tusks of a walrus to make tools; bones for structural elements. I’ll never forget the image of an eskimo woman chewing up her husband’s mukluks to make them soft, stitching them together with sinew. I’m still animated by this simple aspiration of putting everything to good use.
I’ve been critical of recycling, probably past the point of being unkind. To me, recycling is the poster child for putting the cart before the horse. A technology that we scaled on hopes and dreams instead of arithmetic. We spent billions to indoctrinate children into shaming their parents for not sorting garbage. We pretended not to notice the blue bin getting dumped into the same truck as all the other trash. We feel like we are doing our part, but we still aren’t being honest with ourselves — recycling plastic isn’t working.
With the exception of some charming neighborhoods in Copenhagen, recycling plastic uses more gas than just making fresh plastic. Most processes require sorting at least seven kinds of plastics from an infinite stream of other crap. Then you melt this stuff together to make inferior products that aren’t worth much, except to a few yuppie saints in Seattle whose activewear is made of recycled water bottles.
In nature, enzymes are like those Eskimos, pulling apart molecules and putting them together. Each of them is specialized, some can cook, some can sew, some can chew. Your gut is full of these enzymes doing the work of breaking down Gatorade. Unfortunately, you don’t have any that can break down the bottle.
While most people were watching Game of Thrones, scientists all over the world have advanced the technologies needed to design and manufacture new enzymes: directed evolution; physicochemical rules; high‑throughput sequencing; machine learning. We can create tailor‑made enzymes to help us transform plastic trash into something usable.
Rhea’s Factory is doing exactly this. Using AI to design a new toolkit of enzymes that can break down each kind of plastic into the basic building blocks used to make the stuff in the first place. Think of this as disassembling a truck made of Lego bricks, then using those bricks to build a spaceship.
Unlike other recycling processes, Rhea’s enzymes break complex polymers down into monomers. These are identical to what plastic producers buy now to make their product. They can be produced this way for less than virgin monomers and sold into the existing supply chain for plastics.
I still didn’t want to like it when the team told me about their enzymes, but then they explained how all of them can co-exist. Like your stomach – which can process everything from chicken nuggets to Red Bull at the same time – Rhea’s Factory can dump all the mixed up plastics into one big vat and let enzymes break them down. No sorting.