Annually, 350 – 400 million tons of plastic are produced worldwide of which millions of tons accumulate in our oceans due to low circular usage. Marine plastic litter poses a threat to the health of aquatic organisms and humans alike, putting the global community back with respect to reaching the UN sustainable development goals. Besides preventing the generation of hazardous plastic waste, society needs to focus on improving sustainable recycling techniques. In this context, microbial degradation of plastic waste could conduce to environmentally friendly solutions in the future. Our research contributes to a better understanding of enzymes active on specific types of plastic and drives development towards industrial applications. As a proof of concept, we foster the degradation of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) with the fast-growing, marine bacterium Vibrio natriegens by building Golden Gate constructs with relevant genes from two different soil bacteria. When engineering the PET degradation pathway, catabolically active enzymes, as well as translocation systems and transporters have to be considered as the decomposition process requires the excretion of two vital enzymes for PET hydrolysis as well as the uptake of degradation intermediates by V. natriegens. In total, the designed PET degradation pathway combines seven heterologous coding sequences with parts of V. natriegens’ endogenous metabolism to enable the bacterium to use PET as a single carbon source for energy recovery, biomass production, and secondary metabolite synthesis. Further, our research has identified more than 100 new PET degrading enzyme candidates from local marine environments in Western Australia with the help of Hidden Markov models searches on metagenome data. Through taxonomically classifying the microbial producers of the enzymes most closely related to our PETase candidates, we have developed a better understanding of the microbial community that holds PET degrading potential in marine sediment in Western Australia. By improving the efficiency and the applicability of microbial plastic degradation in the marine space, we want to support change towards a circular economy.