Five billion tons of plastic already surrounds us—and growing.
This isn’t waste; it’s accumulation without end. The real breakthrough will be how we undo it.
By Futurist Thomas Frey
There is a number that should stop you cold.
Five thousand million tons.
That’s how much plastic is currently sitting in landfills, floating in oceans, and embedded in ecosystems around the world. Not the amount produced since plastic was invented — the amount that’s already out there, already dispersed, already working its way into the food chain and the water supply and the bodies of every living creature on Earth. Scientists have found plastic particles in Antarctic sea ice, in the deepest ocean trenches, and in human blood. A liter of bottled water contains, on average, nearly a quarter of a million nanoplastic fragments.
And every year, we add 390 million more tons to the pile.
The recycling system that was supposed to manage this — the one with the little arrows on the bottom of every container — handles roughly 9% of what gets produced. The rest is incinerated, buried, or abandoned. Incineration releases toxic gases. Burial means the plastic sits there for centuries. A plastic fishing line, left alone, takes 600 years to break down. A dental floss container, 80 years. A paintbrush, up to a thousand.
This is the problem that Breaking was built to solve. And the way they’re going about it is unlike anything that’s been tried before.
A Microbe That Eats Plastic for Breakfast
In 2022, researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University discovered something extraordinary in their lab. A microorganism — not engineered, just found — that could break down plastic by eating it. Not one type of plastic. Multiple types. Including polyolefins, which are the toughest plastics in common use, the ones that have historically resisted every biological degradation attempt on record.
The microbe was catalogued as X-32. And what it does is genuinely remarkable. It breaks down the hydrocarbon chains inside plastic polymers — the chemical bonds that make plastic so durable and so persistent — using those plastics as its primary food source. The byproducts are carbon dioxide, water, and biomass. No toxic residue. No microplastic fragments. Just the basic building blocks of organic chemistry, which the environment already knows how to handle.
In lab tests, X-32 started breaking down paintbrush bristles, fishing wire, and dental floss within five days. At scale, it has demonstrated the ability to degrade up to 90% of certain polyesters and polyolefins in under 22 months. In plastic terms, that is essentially instantaneous.
Breaking, the company that was spun out of Colossal Biosciences in April 2024, launched with $10.5 million in seed funding specifically to develop X-32 into a commercial product. The founding team reads like a who’s-who of synthetic biology: George Church from Harvard, Donald Ingber who founded the Wyss Institute, and CEO Sukanya Punthambaker, a career synthetic biologist who has spent decades working toward exactly this kind of breakthrough.
Ben Lamm co-founded Breaking and serves on its board. Kent Wakeford, who you’ll remember as the co-CEO of Form Bio, is the executive chairman.
The pattern is the same. A tool built inside Colossal’s orbit, spun out when it became clear the problem it was solving was bigger than Colossal’s mission alone.
You can’t restore life in a plastic-filled world. Cleanup isn’t separate from revival—it’s prerequisite. Fix the environment first, or nothing else we bring back will survive.
Why This Connects to Everything Else
Lamm has been direct about why a de-extinction company is in the plastic business. You cannot restore an ecosystem if the ecosystem is full of plastic. The northern white rhino, the woolly mammoth, the Tasmanian tiger — none of them can thrive in an environment saturated with synthetic polymers that their biology has no way to process. Ecosystem restoration and plastic remediation are not two separate goals. They’re the same goal looked at from different angles.
That framing matters because it explains why Breaking isn’t just an environmental startup that happened to spin out of a biotech company. It’s a mission-critical piece of Colossal’s larger puzzle — the piece that has to work before the rest of the restoration agenda can fully work.
The first commercial applications are targeted at the food waste and composting industry, which turns out to be a surprisingly concrete entry point. Food waste in American landfills costs taxpayers $16 billion per year. The reason so much of it goes to landfills rather than compost is that it’s contaminated with plastic packaging that composting facilities can’t process. If X-32 can remove that plastic contamination efficiently and cheaply, it unlocks a massive and largely untapped composting infrastructure — with direct benefits for greenhouse gas emissions, landfill reduction, and soil health.
From there, the roadmap extends to wastewater treatment, marine bioreactors for ocean microplastic cleanup, and industrial waste management. Each application uses the same core technology, scaled and adapted for a different environment.
The Hard Question
There is an obvious question that every thinking person asks when they hear about a microbe that eats plastic: what happens when you release a plastic-eating organism into the environment?
It’s a fair question. Breaking takes it seriously. Lamm has been consistent that X-32 has no known negative environmental ramifications, that it produces only harmless byproducts, and that the team is focused carefully on all regulatory and safety requirements before any open-environment deployment. The initial applications — food waste facilities, industrial wastewater systems, controlled bioreactors — are contained environments where behavior is observable and risks are manageable.
The broader question of deploying engineered organisms in open ecosystems is one that the regulatory frameworks are still catching up to. This is not unique to Breaking. It’s the central challenge of the entire synthetic biology field. The science is moving faster than the governance. That gap is not an argument against the science — it’s an argument for building the governance faster.
What sets Breaking apart from most of the solutions that have been proposed to the plastic crisis is that it actually works on polyolefins. Polyethylene. Polypropylene. The most common plastics in the world, present in virtually every form of packaging, textile, and consumer product. Every previous microbial approach has stumbled on polyolefins because the carbon bonds are simply too strong for most biological systems to break. X-32 breaks them.
From genomes to software to cleanup—this is a coordinated system for rewriting biology itself. The tools are finally matching the scale of the problems we created.
The Bigger Picture
Each company in this series has shown us a different face of the same underlying strategy. Colossal builds the biological tools. Form Bio builds the software to manage the data those tools generate. Breaking takes the synthetic biology capability developed in Colossal’s labs and turns it toward one of the most urgent environmental problems on the planet.
Together, they form something that starts to look less like a collection of companies and more like a coordinated system — one designed to read the living world, understand it, and intervene in it at the level where the real damage is being done.
Plastic is one of the defining problems of the last century. The tools to solve it are, for the first time, starting to look adequate to the scale of the challenge.
Five thousand million tons is a big number. X-32 is a very small organism. But so is every microbe that has ever changed the world.
Up Next: Astromech — the stealth AI startup that just surfaced with a $2 billion valuation and a goal that might be the most ambitious thing Ben Lamm has ever tried: predicting biological change before it happens.
Related Reading
The Plastic Problem Is Worse Than You Think
National Geographic — A comprehensive look at the scale of global plastic contamination, where it ends up, and why the recycling system was never designed to handle what we’re actually producing
The Promise and Peril of Plastic-Eating Microbes
Nature — A measured scientific assessment of microbial plastic degradation — what’s been demonstrated in labs, what the path to scale actually looks like, and what questions still need answering
Synthetic Biology and the Future of Environmental Remediation
World Economic Forum — How engineered organisms are moving from laboratory curiosities to serious environmental tools, and what the governance frameworks need to look like before widespread deployment