What Can We Do With All the Plastic Polluting Our Environment - Eat It?

By Lance Winslow

image: depositphotos

Although plastic water bottles are quite thin and decompose rapidly in the environment due to UV rays in sunlight, not all plastic de-materializes quickly. Worse, there are so many different types of plastic, and so many products made with plastic, that they have ended up all over our planet, including throughout our oceans. But what if we could collect all of this plastic, put it into one place, and either recycle it, or turn it into something else?

Well, I'd like to talk to you about this for a few moments if I might. You see, there was an interesting article recently in PhysOrg (dot) titled; " Amazon fungi found that eat polyurethane, even without oxygen," published on February 3, 2012 which stated; "Until now polyurethane has been considered non-biodegradable, but a group of students from Yale University in the US has found fungi that will not only eat and digest it, they will do so even in the absence of oxygen."

Why not let nature figure out a way to eat polyurethane plastic for us? In a way it would be a new symbiotic relationship, and one which brings us back full circle in the eco-recycling arena. The organism would be completely happy doing this work, and it is perfectly suited to do so, meanwhile humans win by eliminating these wasted plastics, and the environment wins also without the added pollution. It is interesting that we will be able to take a man-made product and polymeric chains, and let nature break it back down very quickly into usable molecules which are benign.