“I’m going to say just one word: Plastic.”
Remember that line from The Graduate?
At the time of the 1967 movie, plastic was an investor’s dream. Plastic was being used in just about everything, from toys to lawn furniture to dinnerware -- and so many other products.
And that has just increased exponentially since then.
To try to keep up with the onslaught of plastic, people who care about the Earth have been recycling the substance with their weekly trash collection wherever it is offered, or hauling the stuff to local landfill recycling operations.
Millions of tons of plastic have been collected and recycled into new products. But millions more have been simply tossed into the trash, filling up landfills at a rapid pace.
And millions more tons of plastic have found their way into the world’s oceans, creating floating plastic islands that snare fish, turtles and birds.
It was recently revealed that plastic is even making its way into the human food chain, with some people consuming up to a credit card’s worth of microplastic from seafood each week.
Yikes!
But help may be on the way.
Scientists over the last few years have been working to develop bacteria that can “eat” plastic, breaking it down in the environment far more quickly than it otherwise would.
In March 2016, Japanese researchers found a bacteria known as Ideonella sakaiensis that would "eat" the plastic outside of an Osaka bottle factory until it turned into sludge.
By 2020, scientists at the University of Portsmouth had managed to alter the PETase enzyme to create a "cocktail" that could digest plastic up to six times faster than normal.
According to the website LiveScience, these types of plastic-eating bacteria could one day help tackle some of the 14 million tons of plastic dumped into oceans every year.
Plastic pollution leads to severe impacts on marine ecosystems. For example, once plastic enters the ocean it can entangle and kill all manner of sea creatures.
Microplastics are also ingested by many marine species that are both preyed upon by other species that humans catch for food.
Although the recent bacteria discoveries offer hope in the fight against growing mountains of un-recycled plastic, scientists caution we are still years away from widespread commercial use.
And PETase only decomposes PET plastic, while there are six other plastic types that still can’t be degraded using enzymes.
But this latest discovery could be a giant step toward relieving the World of the plastic menace that threatens to engulf us.
Comments