Did you know the sheer amount of trash that is thrown away every year? 268 million tons to be exact, with 140 million tons of that ending up in landfills. Also, on top of that, the average landfill takes up SIX-HUNDRED acres and there are three thousand active landfills in the US. That's a lot of space and a lot of waste that we know takes a significant amount of time to break down.
One of the more recent ways scientists have been looking into mitigating this issue is by using microbes that digest plastics. However, most of these microbes can only really do this, at least effectively at 30°C, (or 86°F) which is not exactly ideal. New research from the Swiss Federal Institute WSL has uncovered microbes that are capable of digesting plastic between 4°C and 20°C (or 39°F and 68°F) and are working on identifying the ideal temperature.
The researchers tested multiple strains of bacteria and fungi and found more than a dozen were capable of digesting multiple types of bio-degradable plastics. They did test the bacteria against a non-biodegradable plastic and none of the species used could break it down. That does not mean though that this is a failure or pointless. The fact is most biodegradable plastics are not exactly what we think they are. Biodegradable is only one category of bioplastics; degradable, biodegradable and compostable. All three of these degrade to different degrees and under different conditions however, especially in the case of biodegradables, the exact right conditions need to exist or they simply will not degrade faster than traditional plastics. With that in mind, anything to speed along the process is beneficial to reducing the sheer amount of waste sitting in landfills.
The idea as to why the bacteria are able to digest the plastic is that the structure of the plastics is similar enough to the structure of the plant cells the bacteria are already able to digest. The hope for the future would be to identify the enzyme used to optimize the process. “The next big challenge will be to identify the plastic-degrading enzymes produced by the microbial strains and to optimise the process to obtain large amounts of proteins. In addition, further modification of the enzymes might be needed to optimise properties such as protein stability,” said Dr. Beat Fray of their work to theguardian.com.
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