By Alex Pedan (From Seeds October – November 2025)

Worrying about plastic pollution and climate change can give you a headache, and find you reaching for some paracetamol. But did you know that paracetamol is actually a petroleum-based product, requiring oil for its manufacture? Sair heid?

Don’t worry though. Help is on the way from a local scientist, and the friends that live inside us all.

Professor Stephen Wallace’s lab at the University of Edinburgh has discovered that bacteria can be genetically re-jigged to make our favourite analgesic. Also, they can be made to clean up plastic waste at the same time.

The bacteria in question, E. coli, are the ones that are found everywhere, including inside our guts, helping us digest food and generally stay healthy. Over the last four billion years or so they’ve been happily doing their usual thing of growing – dividing – dying – repeat, using a grab bag of chemicals available to them in the natural environment.

However, if you take them into the lab and block some of their genes, they become unable to use their usual building blocks.

Unfazed by this insult, if you give them the breakdown products of waste plastic, they can use those instead.

This was the first breakthrough of Professor Wallace’s lab. Their second was to hunt for certain genes in soil bacteria and fungi. If they put these into their plastic-busting E. coli, they could get them to make paracetamol. So, they now have a micro machine to clear up our plastic mess and make something useful from it. Hurrah.

It’ll take quite a while for this to be scaled up to replace the traditional manufacturing process, but hopefully less than four billion years!

For more info…
‘Scientists use bacteria to turn plastic waste into paracetamol’