Plastic Eating Bacteria - End of Plastic Pollution Problem?

Photo Credit: DAVID JONES

Mary Halton, Science reporter in BBC News reports that there may be a natural solution for one of the world's notorious pollution problem - plastic pollution - in the form of plastic eating bacteria. Plastic pollution is really a huge problem.

Plastic is not only filling world's landfills, it is spreading out and polluting the oceans as well causing immense damage to environment and marine life. As I posted in a blog earlier here, studies suggest that there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish by 2050:

https://steemit.com/lifestyle/@successforall/the-oceans-will-contain-more-plastic-than-fish-by-2050

It has already spreaded out of control and is reaching the pristine arctic:

https://steemit.com/nature/@successforall/plastic-pollution-reaches-pristine-arctic

and polluting the oceans and destroying the coral reefs:

https://steemit.com/environment/@successforall/a-third-of-coral-reefs-entangled-with-plastic

Only 14% of the total world production of plastic is recycled where as 58% of the paper and 70 to 90% of the iorn and steel is recycled.

The reporter points out that it takes 100s of years for PET, the strong plastic used in bottles, to degrade and breakdown naturally. Now scientists have discovered and modified a bacterium enzyme that can breakdown plastic in a matter of days. Current artificial recycling methods are very inefficient "that polyester materials follow a downward quality spiral, losing some of their properties each time they go through the cycle. Bottles become fleeces, then carpets, after which they often end up in landfill", the reporter says.

Adding further that "PETase bacteria reverses the manufacturing process, reducing polyesters to their building blocks, ready to be used again. "They could be used to make more plastic and that would avoid using any more oil...Then basically we'd close the loop. We'd actually have proper recycling," explained Prof McGeehan.

That all sounds very nice, but don't go out throw out all the plastic in the garbage can yet, we still have to responsibly recycle plastic, since it will be a few years before they prefect the bacteria development and setup a commercially viable recycle system using the bacteria.

Content source credit: BBC News via Sola - https://sola.ai/posts/MDgyOWU4/9