Engineers at UT Austin modified wild PET-eating bacterial enzymes to create FAST-PETase, which breaks down polyethylene terephthalate in under 24 hours instead of 6 weeks. Similar bioleaching strains extract rare earth metals 73 percent faster than natural microbes. Yet environmental deployment remains frozen under the 1986 Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA): of more than 240 applications filed between 1987 and 2018, almost none were approved, because any intergeneric marker gene classifies the living organism as a synthetic chemical.