Polymer industry waste, can microbes degrade it?

Anthropogenic pollution by industrial waste is both ubiquitous and well-characterised. An area of this that has recently received increasing attention is ocean plastic pollution. Pollution of the oceans by synthetic polymers, such as plastics, is now widespread and current estimates put the annual input of plastic waste into the ocean at 4.8 to 12.7 million tons. Much of this plastic waste is known to exist as microplastics (plastics <5 mm). Microplastics may enter the ocean via a number of routes, for example: i) accidental release during the manufacturing process of larger plastics (plastic resin pellets); ii) plastics specifically manufactured to be small (i.e. in facial cleansers/exfoliators); or iii) breakdown of larger plastics.
Bacterial strains that are capable of the degradation of plastics have been isolated from environmental samples, however, it has been found previously that a bacterial consortia, or community, may be better at degrading plastic than an individual strain. Artificial selection - the application of a pressure on organisms to induce the expression of desirable traits - has been used to evolve bacterial communities that are better able to breakdown contaminants than their environmental counterparts.
The project will focus on evolving a microbial community for the degradation of synthetic polymers and characterising the communities that are evolved. The aim of this is to determine whether an artificially evolved microbial community may be better at degrading polymers than either the original environmental community or individual bacterial strains known to be capable of polymer degradation.