Daniel Burd, a 16 year old from Canada recently discovered microbes that "eat" plasticthat ultimately reduce the amount of time needed for plastic to decompose. Since plastic is one of the greatest threats to our environment today, this new discovery is essentially changes enviornmental issues forever. According to the Clean Air Council, Americans use 1 billion shopping bags yearly, amounting to 300,000 tons of waste left in landfills. Notwithstanding, the amoung of bags recycled consistantly remains at 1%. Burd considered that plastic eventually has to decompose, and searched for a faster process. He immersed ground plastic in a yeast solution to encourage microbial growth, then isolated the most productive organisms. Once six weeks had passed, the plastic decomposed by 43 percent.
If this discovery turns out to be successful, not only will it improve our current recycling efforts, but it will improve our enviroment for the future. Even though this could prove to be an improvement to pollution in our world, ultimately people need to be aware of what they are doing to the environment by using plastic products instead of reuseable ones.
Article: http://blog.enn.com/?p=853
If we could find a way to harness these microbes for good, it would really be awesome. It seems like there could be a lot of things to go wrong, though.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree. People still need to learn to recycle and stop wasting so much plastic but this kind of discovery could be the solution to years of built up landfills if it were adapted to a larger scale. This is not an excuse for people to continue polluting the environment. It is a fix for past mistakes that we as humans have made.
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