From PET Bottles to Sweet Delicacies

The treatment of waste PET bottles has become a pressing global issue over the last few decades, and many scientific teams are currently working on solutions to it. There are many different approaches of how to solve this problem. The present article outlines the possibility to process terephthalic acid, which is the hydrolysis product of polyethylene terephthalate, into vanillin, a compound widely used in the food industry. The work of British scientists who have succeeded in using genetic modification to produce a strain of E. coli RARE_pVanX capable of processing polyethylene terephthalate hydrolysates to the desired vanillin is presented in a broader context.