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In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.

Plastic-eating enzyme holds promise in fighting pollution — scientists 
  
 Updated 
  
 Scientists in Britain and the United States say they have engineered a plastic-eating enzyme that could one day help in the fight against pollution. 
  
 Key points: The enzyme was discovered in a waste recycling centre in Japan 
  
 Scientists think they can improve its plastic eating ability even more 
  
 But it is still early days, according to an independent review 
  
 The enzyme is able to digest polyethylene terephthalate, or PET — a form of plastic patented in the 1940s and now used in millions of tonnes of plastic bottles. 
  
 PET plastics can persist in the environment for hundreds of years and currently pollute large areas of land and sea worldwide. 
  
 Researchers from Britain's University of Portsmouth and the US Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory made the discovery while examining the structure of a natural enzyme thought to have evolved in a waste recycling centre in Japan. 
  
 Possibility of turning PET back into building blocks 
  
 Finding that this enzyme was helping a type of bacteria to break down, or digest, PET plastic, the researchers decided to "tweak" its structure by adding some amino acids, said John McGeehan, a professor at Portsmouth who co-led the work. 
  
 This led to a serendipitous change in the enzyme's actions — allowing its plastic-eating abilities to work faster. 
  
 "We've made an improved version of the enzyme better than the natural one already," Professor McGeehan said. 
  
 "That's really exciting because that means that there's potential to optimise the enzyme even further." 
  
 The team, whose finding was published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, is now working on improving the enzyme further to see if they can make it capable of breaking down PET plastics on an industrial scale. 
  
 "It's well within the possibility that in the coming years we will see an industrially viable process to turn PET, and potentially other (plastics), back into their original building blocks so that they can be sustainably recycled," Professor McGeehan said. 
  
 Potential solution still at early stage 
  
 Independent scientists not directly involved with the research said it was exciting, but cautioned that the enzyme's development as a potential solution for pollution was still at an early stage. 
  
 "Enzymes are non-toxic, biodegradable and can be produced in large amounts by microorganisms," said Oliver Jones, a chemistry expert at RMIT University in Melbourne. 
  
 "There is strong potential to use enzyme technology to help with society's growing waste problem by breaking down some of the most commonly used plastics." 
  
 Douglas Kell, a professor of bioanalytical science at Manchester University, said further rounds of work "should be expected to improve the enzyme yet further". 
  
 "All told, this advance brings the goal of sustainably recyclable polymers significantly closer," he added. 
  
 Reuters 
  
 Topics: plastics-and-rubber, pollution, water-pollution, environment, science-and-technology, research, united-kingdom, united-states, japan 
  
 First posted ||||| The breakthrough, spurred by the discovery of plastic-eating bugs at a Japanese dump, could help solve the global plastic pollution crisis 
  
 Scientists have created a mutant enzyme that breaks down plastic drinks bottles – by accident. The breakthrough could help solve the global plastic pollution crisis by enabling for the first time the full recycling of bottles. 
  
 The new research was spurred by the discovery in 2016 of the first bacterium that had naturally evolved to eat plastic, at a waste dump in Japan. Scientists have now revealed the detailed structure of the crucial enzyme produced by the bug. 
  
 The international team then tweaked the enzyme to see how it had evolved, but tests showed they had inadvertently made the molecule even better at breaking down the PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic used for soft drink bottles. “What actually turned out was we improved the enzyme, which was a bit of a shock,” said Prof John McGeehan, at the University of Portsmouth, UK, who led the research. “It’s great and a real finding.” 
  
 The mutant enzyme takes a few days to start breaking down the plastic – far faster than the centuries it takes in the oceans. But the researchers are optimistic this can be speeded up even further and become a viable large-scale process. 
  
 “What we are hoping to do is use this enzyme to turn this plastic back into its original components, so we can literally recycle it back to plastic,” said McGeehan. “It means we won’t need to dig up any more oil and, fundamentally, it should reduce the amount of plastic in the environment.” 
  
 About 1m plastic bottles are sold each minute around the globe and, with just 14% recycled, many end up in the oceans where they have polluted even the remotest parts, harming marine life and potentially people who eat seafood. “It is incredibly resistant to degradation. Some of those images are horrific,” said McGeehan. “It is one of these wonder materials that has been made a little bit too well.” 
  
 However, currently even those bottles that are recycled can only be turned into opaque fibres for clothing or carpets. The new enzyme indicates a way to recycle clear plastic bottles back into clear plastic bottles, which could slash the need to produce new plastic. 
  
 “You are always up against the fact that oil is cheap, so virgin PET is cheap,” said McGeehan. “It is so easy for manufacturers to generate more of that stuff, rather than even try to recycle. But I believe there is a public driver here: perception is changing so much that companies are starting to look at how they can properly recycle these.” 
  
 Quick guide What are PET plastics? Show Hide PET – or polyethylene terephthalate – is the most common plastic used for soft drinks bottles. This is because it is lightweight, shatterproof, easy to mould and colour and cheap to produce. The key raw material is oil. PET in a different form is also used in clothing, where it is called polyester. The estimated recycling rates for PET bottles vary significantly around the world, from 31% in the US, to 48% in Europe, 72% in Japan and 90% in India, where rag pickers collect the bottles to sell to waste traders. Deposit return schemes are very successful in some countries. But, globally, many bottles end polluting the environment. 
  
 PET bottles that are recycled have to be cleaned, sorted by colour, then shredded and dried to produce PET flakes. These can then be used to make new plastic but, due to impurities, it is not usually possible to make new, clear PET bottles. Instead, recycled bottles are mostly used to make polyester fibres. 
  
  
  
 The new research, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, began by determining the precise structure of the enzyme produced by the Japanese bug. The team used the Diamond Light Source, near Oxford, UK, an intense beam of X-rays that is 10bn times brighter than the sun and can reveal individual atoms. 
  
 The structure of the enzyme looked very similar to one evolved by many bacteria to break down cutin, a natural polymer used as a protective coating by plants. But when the team manipulated the enzyme to explore this connection, they accidentally improved its ability to eat PET. 
  
 “It is a modest improvement – 20% better – but that is not the point,” said McGeehan. “It’s incredible because it tells us that the enzyme is not yet optimised. It gives us scope to use all the technology used in other enzyme development for years and years and make a super-fast enzyme.” 
  
 Play Video 3:32 Welcome to Australia's plastic beach – video 
  
 Industrial enzymes are widely used in, for example, washing powders and biofuel production, They have been made to work up to 1,000 times faster in a few years, the same timescale McGeehan envisages for the plastic-eating enzyme. A patent has been filed on the specific mutant enzyme by the Portsmouth researchers and those from the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado. 
  
 One possible improvement being explored is to transplant the mutant enzyme into an “extremophile bacteria” that can survive temperatures above 70C, at which point PET changes from a glassy to a viscous state, making it likely to degrade 10-100 times faster. 
  
 Earlier work had shown that some fungi can break down PET plastic, which makes up about 20% of global plastic production. But bacteria are far easier to harness for industrial uses. 
  
 Other types of plastic could be broken down by bacteria currently evolving in the environment, McGeehan said: “People are now searching vigorously for those.” PET sinks in seawater but some scientists have conjectured that plastic-eating bugs might one day be sprayed on the huge plastic garbage patches in the oceans to clean them up. 
  
 Microplastic pollution in oceans is far worse than feared, say scientists Read more 
  
 “I think [the new research] is very exciting work, showing there is strong potential to use enzyme technology to help with society’s growing waste problem,” said Oliver Jones, a chemist at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, and not part of the research team. 
  
 “Enzymes are non-toxic, biodegradable and can be produced in large amounts by microorganisms,” he said. “There is still a way to go before you could recycle large amounts of plastic with enzymes, and reducing the amount of plastic produced in the first place might, perhaps, be preferable. [But] this is certainly a step in a positive direction.” 
  
  
  
 Prof Adisa Azapagic, at the University of Manchester in the UK, agreed the enzyme could be useful but added: “A full life-cycle assessment would be needed to ensure the technology does not solve one environmental problem – waste – at the expense of others, including additional greenhouse gas emissions.” 
  
 •This article was amended on 17 April 2018 to make clear that PET becomes viscous above 70C. Its melting point is above 250C. |||||
Output:
Some rare good news in the fight against plastic pollution: Scientists working with a plastic-eating microbe discovered in Japan two years ago accidentally created a mutant enzyme that sounds like an environmentalist's dream, the Guardian reports. The enzyme breaks down the PET—polyethylene terephthalate—used in plastic bottles even more efficiently than the original microbe, which had evolved to eat the waste it encountered around an Osaka recycling plant. Researchers, who inadvertently improved the enzyme while investigating how it evolved, say the tweaks enable it to begin digesting plastic more quickly. It now takes just a few days to start breaking down plastic, and researchers say more tweaks could make the process super-fast, reducing both plastic waste and the need to create more plastic. "What we are hoping to do is use this enzyme to turn this plastic back into its original components, so we can literally recycle it back to plastic," says lead researcher John McGeehan at the University of Portsmouth. "It means we won’t need to dig up any more oil and, fundamentally, it should reduce the amount of plastic in the environment." Experts not involved in the research say it sounds extremely promising, though it may be a while before the enzyme can be used as a large-scale solution to plastic pollution, reports the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. "Enzymes are non-toxic, biodegradable, and can be produced in large amounts by microorganisms," notes RMIT University chemistry expert Oliver Jones. (Researchers were depressed to discover the true extent of the Pacific Garbage Patch.)