Plastics have become an incredible burden of pollution in the last 60 years. In the Pacific Ocean a huge island of plastic garbage has agglomerated called "the Great Pacific garbage patch", which is at least the size of Texas and perhaps even the double of that. Needless to say that animal wild life suffers tremendously.
Also in shallow water and slow rivers you often have areas where plastic garbage piles up. The problem with most plastics is that they are not degraded by nature. Even the strongest acid, hydrogen fluoride can be safely kept in polyethylene containers, which will not be affected by it in the slightest degree.
Are we then going to suffocate in our plastics debris in the near future?
Fortunately technology develops, sometimes by serendipity. In this post I will discuss two new promising techniques. In the video below you see the invention from the Japanese scientist (Akinori Ito), from a company called Blest, who invented a machine that converts plastics back into oil. After all, plastics are made from oil. They reported that for the smaller hydrocarbons released in the process (methane, ethane, propane and butane gasses), the machine is equipped with an off-gas filter that turns these gases into water and carbon.
Amazing isn't it. Even more amazing is the following: Researchers at Cambridge University and the Spanish National Research Council identified caterpillars that can degrade plastics (polyethylene in particular). Yes, you hear it well, caterpillars can munch our garbage. The bug is called Galleria mellonella. You can see how 10 caterpillars degrade a plastic bag in the video below:
But there is a snag. Firstly, you need an awful lot of them and secondly, since they naturally eat wax they can devastate bee colonies. The researchers are now searching to find the enzymes responsible for this degradation process and the corresponding genes. I speculate that once they have done so, they will try to clone the gene into a microorganism. And if that works, we'd really have something which can be produced massively and used to degrade plastics.
Image from http://blueocean.net.
I hope you liked this post. Thank you for reading.