Idea that Sparked my YA SF Recycling Humanity Series is now Real Science!

June 9, 2018

You can pre-order Talia’s Planet, book 5 in the series here! It comes out June 13, 2018.

In 2012 when I first decided to start writing a novel for the NaNoWriMocontest, I was woken up in the middle of the night with the idea that became the backstory for my Recycling Humanity series. In the Recycling Humanity universe the Earth has been destroyed by overpopulation and destruction of the environment. A scientist came up with a bacteria to eat up all the plastics that were overfilling the garbage dumps, oceans, and cities. But his bacteria got out of control and destroyed everything man-made and natural, so all of civilization came crashing down as it ate through buildings, transportation, food storage, vegetation, and eventually everyone on Earth was left with a bare, dead Earth.

Thankfully, in the Recycling Humanity universe humans had already mastered living in space, so what was left of humanity abandoned their dying Earth and built generational space habits to live in. This is where Recycling Humanity, book 1 starts.

This past April scientists in Japan discovered a mutant enzyme in a waste dump that actually eats plastic! Previously we’ve known that certain waxworm caterpillars were able to eat through certain plastics, but this new discovery could help our current problem with waste plastics.

As long as it doesn’t mutate too much like in my novels!