Yet another example of how clever nature is: Some ocean bacteria have adapted to break down plastic. According to @AnthropoceneMag, a team of researchers found that more than 75% of water samples they took in a global study contained an enzyme that degrades PET, one of the most common types of plastic in use today. "In the ocean, where carbon is scarce, microbes seem to have fine-tuned these enzymes to make use of this new, human-made carbon source: plastic,” said Carlos Duarte, a marine ecologist at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia.