Ocean Floor Microbe Eats Plastic and Excretes Battery Material

A microbe scraped from a Pacific trench may be the most economically interesting organism ever discovered. It digests PET plastic — and its metabolic byproduct turns out to be a compound usable in lithium-battery cathodes.

The research team spent two years confirming the find, assuming contamination before accepting what their instruments kept telling them: the microbe was converting plastic waste into energy-storage material with 91% efficiency.

From trench to factory

A pilot bioreactor facility begins construction next year, designed to process 50 tonnes of ocean plastic monthly. If yields hold at industrial scale, the economics are startling — waste cleanup that pays for itself in battery materials.

“Evolution solved two of our biggest problems with one organism. We just had to go four thousand meters down to find it,” the lead author said.

Peer reviewers have called the metabolic pathway “unprecedented”; three independent labs have now replicated the core results.