Biological remediation - a treatment process using microorganisms to break down, or degrade organic contaminants or toxic hazardous into less toxic or nontoxic substances.
What would modern life be like without plastic? However, plastic bags, due to biodegrade resistant, can take between 400 to 1,000 years to break down, because of photodegrade. When breaking down, it contaminates soil and waterways. Nearly 90% of the debris in our oceans is plastic, which causes over 100,000 seabirds, fish, turtles and other marine life deaths every year when animals mistake them for food.
In the past decade, scientists and engineers have been trying to find plastic-eating organisms to break down plastic substances into - opening a new door to solve the global plastic problem for our environment - according to the United Nations Environmental Programme, global plastic consumption has gone from 5.5 million tons in the 1950s to 110 million tons in 2009. only less than 10%, for example in American, of the total gets recycled, and the rest presents great challenges, ranging from water contamination to marine animal skilling.
According to the news published in Scienceblog, some bacteria could help transform a key component of disposable cups, plates and utensils into a useful eco-friendly plastic, significantly reducing the environmental impact of this ubiquitous, but difficult-to-recycle waste stream.
Kevin O’Connor and his colleagues have found a special strain of the soil bacterium Pseudomonas putida, converted polystyrene foam — commonly known as Styrofoam into a biodegradable plastic leading to
the possibility of converting a petroleum-based plastic waste into a reusable biodegradable form.
Mealworm, the tiny worm, which is the larvae form of the darkling beetle, according to the paper published in published in Environ. Sci. Technol., 2015, 49 (20), pp 12080–12086,
can subsist on a diet of Styrofoam and other forms of polystyrene. The study was the first to provide detailed evidence of bacterial degradation of plastic in an animal’s gut. Understanding how bacteria within mealworms carry out this feat, according to co-authored by Dr. Wu, a senior research engineer in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford, could potentially enable new options for safe management of plastic waste.
