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We made a material so good at lasting that nothing alive could eat it. That was the design. We wanted it. We got it.
Then, in a puddle outside a recycling plant in Japan, something ate it anyway.
I've watched plastic wash up on three shorelines — Lima, San Francisco, the Great Barrier Reef — and every time I thought the same thing everybody thinks. That's permanent now. That's just the world we made.
Then, in a puddle outside a recycling plant in Japan, something ate it anyway.
I've watched plastic wash up on three shorelines — Lima, San Francisco, the Great Barrier Reef — and every time I thought the same thing everybody thinks. That's permanent now. That's just the world we made.
I was wrong, and not about the plastic.
In 2016 two scientists in Japan didn't ask how to build something that could eat PET. They asked whether anything was eating it already —and if so, where it would be.
Then they went and looked.
Creators and Guests
What is Invent?
Invent is about how to make things that don't exist yet.
A man in a chicken suit at a Padres game. A pathologist in Perth
who saw something in a stomach that couldn't be there. Two
scientists who went looking in the sludge outside a recycling
plant.
Every week, somebody who saw a thing everyone agreed was
impossible and found the way through.
I'm Tara Lemméy. I invent things that don't exist — my biggest
inventions were never patentable, like architecting the
intelligence sharing system still used across the US intelligence
community.
Inventors see the world sideways, and sideways is where the
answer is.
Featured on Apple Podcasts.