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https://pgsignal.com/2024/04/08/natures-recyclers-can-bacteria-and-fungi-win-the-war-on-plastic/>
"What if we could find a germ that broke down our plastic waste into tiny
building blocks that could be reassembled and recycled again and again,
allowing us never to produce another ounce of new plastic again?
That’s the dream that scientists are now pursuing, using bacteria that can,
functionally, “eat” plastic. They’re looking into a different strain of
bacteria that could break down plastics in the ocean. There’s a fungus that may
show promise for breaking down hard-to-recycle food containers. And scientists
found, a few years back, that the larvae of a moth that lives in beehives
seemed to like to eat plastic bags.
Current methods of recycling plastic, which largely involve crushing it to
break it down, yield new material that is lower quality — and so less
marketable — than new plastic. So many companies wind up opting for new
plastic, instead of the more expensive, lower-quality recycled product.
But recycling plastics could chemically break down plastic into components that
can be reassembled — and it yields a material that’s exactly the same quality
as new plastics. One company says that its process, which uses bacterial
enzymes, produces half the carbon emissions that it takes to produce new
plastics.
Recycling with bacteria “fills a gap that other recycling methods can’t do
well,” said Elizabeth Bell, a researcher with the National Renewable Energy
Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colorado. “What remains to be seen is how viable
it is at scale.”
The scale of the plastics problem is enormous, and calls for novel solutions.
Every day, plastic that could fill 2,000 garbage trucks gets dumped into the
world’s waters, according to the United Nations (UN). The plastics that humans
have produced worldwide exceed the biomass of all living organisms, according
to a 2020 study published in
Nature. Of all that plastic, only about 9
percent has ever been recycled.
In spite of that, plastic production continues to increase year over year: It’s
expected to more than triple between 2017 and 2050, according to GRID-Arendal,
a Norwegian nonprofit environmental research organization that partners with
the UN.
It’s clear that we need new ways to recycle plastic. And that’s where the
bacteria come in."
Via Esther Schindler.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
