One reason plastic waste persists in the environment is because there’s not much that can eat it. The chemical structure of most polymers is stable and different enough from existing food sources that bacteria didn’t have enzymes that could digest them. Evolution has started to change that situation, though, and a number of strains have been identified that can digest some common plastics.
An international team of researchers has decided to take advantage of those strains and bundle plastic-eating bacteria into the plastic. To keep them from eating it while it’s in use, the bacteria is mixed in as inactive spores that should only start digesting the plastic once it’s released into the environment.
One of the problems with plastic is that we look at it as an infinite resource. Most of it is derived from fossil fuels which is quickly becoming an expensive product because there is less and less of every year.
And it’s crazy when you think about it because we have a finite resource which we just use for a bit of convenience once and then throw away … everywhere, all over the world, every moment of the day, perpetually until it all runs out … the end of which we are starting to see.
We should have a universal plastics industry that only produces a small number of uniform types of plastic that could all be easily recycled and used more than once.
This is a great comment, thanks. I also want to say that even as a kid I remember thinking how crazy it was how my family had trash that got picked up every week to go get buried somewhere, and when I was visiting my friend’s house, his family also had trash that would go to landfill. Every single week. Anecdotally, at least two families had trash going somewhere to get squished down. Scared me a bit as a kid, honestly.
Waste management is both a science and an art, but I feel like of all the things we take for granted now, it’s the biggest one.
And to return to your comment, a massive part of landfill-bound waste is plastic that isn’t (or never was) economic to recycle.
