Make it easier to be green: Solutions for a more sustainable planet

The editorial frames an urgent context of global environmental crises driven by population growth, unsustainable agricultural, transport, and industrial practices, and escalating pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. These pressures contribute to biodiversity loss and climate change, with warming, extreme weather, and sea-level rise already affecting millions—disproportionately in the Global South. Against this backdrop, the article introduces a PLOS Biology collection that highlights actionable, science-based solutions and technological advances aimed at building a more sustainable future.

The editorial synthesizes insights from a curated set of perspectives and reviews. It references policy and ecological work on resolving conflicts between agriculture and the environment and planetary-scale constraints. Jhu and Oldroyd discuss leveraging legume symbioses to engineer self-fertilizing crops via biological nitrogen fixation to reduce synthetic fertilizer use. Cavelius and colleagues review biofuels from first to fourth generation, emphasizing the role of genetic engineering—especially in microorganisms—and policy frameworks (with examples from the EU) to support biofuels as a complement for lowering greenhouse gas emissions. Howe and Bombelli evaluate the feasibility of directly producing electricity via microbial photosynthesis, outlining technological hurdles for biophotovoltaic devices to power small electronics. McCutcheon and Power assess microbially mediated CO2 removal in mining, showing how microbes in tailings can both sequester carbon and recover critical minerals for green technologies. Ralph highlights the use of algae to capture atmospheric CO2 within industrial manufacturing (e.g., beverages), creating value-added products and complementing carbon capture strategies. Bertocchini and Arias explore insect-derived enzymes capable of degrading persistent synthetic polymers, identifying key unknowns in their mechanisms and biotechnological potential. Ortiz provides a perspective on bioplastics derived from renewable sources, noting that their environmental impacts and degradability remain unresolved questions.

- Engineering crop-microbe symbioses offers a pathway to self-fertilizing crops, potentially reducing synthetic fertilizer use, downstream water pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions. - Advanced biofuels—especially microbe-engineered biomass-based fuels—could complement decarbonization, contingent on supportive policy and careful land-use considerations. - Microbial photosynthesis for direct electricity generation (biophotovoltaics) shows promise but currently faces significant performance and deployment hurdles. - Microbial processes in mine tailings can simultaneously remove atmospheric CO2 (creating industrial carbon sinks) and recover critical minerals needed for green energy technologies. - Algae-based systems can fix carbon within industrial processes, adding economic value to carbon capture and supporting greener manufacturing. - Newly discovered insect enzymes may enable biodegradation of resistant synthetic plastics, though their mechanisms and scalability remain open questions. - Bioplastics from renewable sources are a promising alternative to conventional plastics, but their real-world environmental impacts and degradability require rigorous assessment. - Across technologies, full life-cycle and systems-level environmental assessments are essential, alongside cross-sector partnerships, to ensure net sustainability benefits.

The editorial argues that achieving sustainability requires integrating biological and engineering innovations with policy and systems thinking. The highlighted solutions collectively target major environmental pressures—agricultural inputs, energy production, carbon emissions, mineral sourcing, and plastic pollution—providing complementary avenues to reduce emissions, pollution, and resource use. However, realizing their potential depends on overcoming technological barriers (e.g., scaling biophotovoltaics, enzyme efficacy for plastic degradation), ensuring supportive policy and regulatory frameworks (e.g., for biofuels), and verifying net benefits through rigorous life-cycle assessment. The piece emphasizes equitable implementation and the need for collaborations among scientists, engineers, industry, and government to translate concepts into impactful, real-world deployments.

This editorial curates and contextualizes actionable strategies for a more sustainable planet, spanning engineered crop symbioses, advanced biofuels, microbial and algal carbon capture, and biologically enabled plastic degradation and alternatives. It calls for comprehensive life-cycle assessments and cross-disciplinary partnerships to guide responsible adoption. Future work should focus on engineering self-fertilizing staple crops, scaling and improving efficiency of biophotovoltaic systems, optimizing microbial mineral recovery with CO2 sequestration, integrating algae-based carbon capture into diverse industries, elucidating and engineering plastic-degrading enzymes, and rigorously evaluating the environmental performance of bioplastics across their life cycles. Broader policy frameworks and global collaboration are needed to enable deployment at scale, particularly with attention to equity and impacts in the Global South.

As an editorial and curated collection overview, the work is not an empirical study and is not exhaustive or definitive. Many highlighted technologies are early-stage, with uncertain scalability and real-world efficacy (e.g., biophotovoltaics not yet demonstrated for practical power needs; mechanisms of insect-derived plastic-degrading enzymes unresolved; environmental impacts of bioplastics undetermined). Conclusions rely on cited perspectives and reviews rather than new data, and generalizability depends on future technological advances and policy conditions.