FIG 1.

Main synthetic polymers globally produced in 2016. Numbers in the chart indicate the global annual production (millions of tons) of the specified synthetic polymer. Global annual plastic production was extracted from references 1–4, and https://www.plasticsinsight.com/global-pet-resin-production-capacity, https://www.plasticsinsight.com/resin-intelligence/resin-prices/polyamide/, and https://www.plasticsinsight.com/world-plastics-production/. Monomers are depicted above the chart. Indicated are the names of bacterial genera producing verified enzymes with available protein sequences that are known to be involved in the breakdown of the high-molecular-weight polymers (not the additives, plasticizers, etc.). For detailed references on the individual enzymes, refer to the main text. For PA, PE, PS, PVC, and PP, no defined enzymes that act on the polymer have been identified at the level of amino acid or DNA sequences. For enzymes acting on dimers or oligomers and feeding them into the different metabolic pathways, see the main text. For additional structural information on the polymers we refer to ChEBI (https://www.ebi.ac.uk/chebi/init.do).