Polypropylene has long been recycling’s head scratching riddle. Professor Ali Abbas from the School of Chemical and Molecular Engineering and Chief Circular Engineer at Circular Australia said: “Despite the massive scale of plastic production and consumption, there has been very little attention paid to plastics degradation under environmental conditions, and our understanding of how plastics can be degraded is limited. Since completing the study, the team has isolated other microorganisms from the marine environment and used a similar process to degrade marine plastic waste, with preliminary results showing even higher degradation