TIL - Laboratory experiments show that bacteria really do eat and digest plastic
TIL - Laboratory experiments show that bacteria really do eat and digest plastic
The bacterium Rhodococcus ruber eats and actually digests plastic.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
When she fed that plastic to bacteria after pretreatment with "sunlight" -- a UV lamp -- in a bottle of simulated seawater, she saw that special version of carbon appear as CO2 above the water.
"The treatment with UV light was necessary because we already know that sunlight partially breaks down plastic into bite-sized chunks for bacteria," the researcher explains.
Even though marine microbiologist Goudriaan is very excited about the plastic-eating bacteria, she stresses that microbial digestion is not a solution to the huge problem of all the plastic floating on and in our oceans.
Recently Goudriaan's colleague Annalisa Delre published a paper about sun light which breaks down plastics on the ocean's surfaces.
In the latest issue of Marine Pollution Bulletin, PhD student Annalisa Delre and colleagues calculate that about two percent of visibly floating plastic may disappear from the ocean surface in this way each year.
Our data show that sunlight could thus have degraded a substantial amount of all the floating plastic that has been littered into the oceans since the 1950s," says Delre.
I'm a bot and I'm open source!
It eats it slowly, though. And isn't necessarily good at self-sustaining
There isn't a bacteria today we can colonize the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to get rid of the plastic.
Plastics are only made up of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, chlorine, and sulfur though, not very exotic.
I found this article on stuff that might be able to get rid of it
Microbes in oceans and soils across the globe are evolving to eat plastic, according to a study.
The research scanned more than 200m genes found in DNA samples taken from the environment and found 30,000 different enzymes that could degrade 10 different types of plastic.
No offence but using variety of elements in a molecules composition to determine its 'exoticness' is a horrible metric.
Human life is probably one of the most complex machines out there, and that's all we are; shit carbon alone I'd say is the most exotic element due to its versatility, look at CNT's, diamonds, and oil
(big fancy ones like uranium tend to be less interesting cause their lack of stability, carbon has 4 really stable bonds it can do a shitload with - aka hold a plastic bottle together for a couple thousand years)
I'll take "last organisms standing on earth" for 100 , Alex.
Yeah sounds like a great idea in theory. But just imagine a bacteria with an heavy appetite for plastics escapes from the laboratory and starts consuming plastics. Imagine how much of a vehicle is plastic, or your clothes, etc. That could get ugly real fast.