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posted by chromas on Tuesday May 21 2019, @11:11PM   Printer-friendly

ScienceMag:

Plastic makes up nearly 70% of all ocean litter, putting countless aquatic species at risk. But there is a tiny bit of hope—a teeny, tiny one to be precise: Scientists have discovered that microscopic marine microbes are eating away at the plastic, causing trash to slowly break down.

[...] Both types of plastic lost a significant amount of weight after being exposed to the natural and engineered microbes, scientists reported in April in the Journal of Hazardous Materials. The microbes further changed the chemical makeup of the material, causing the polyethylene’s weight to go down by 7% and the polystyrene’s weight to go down by 11%. These findings may offer a new strategy to help combat ocean pollution: Deploy marine microbes to eat up the trash. However, researchers still need to measure how effective these microbes would be on a global scale.

Perhaps one day Earth's inheritors will snack on Big Mac...wrappers.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 21 2019, @11:19PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 21 2019, @11:19PM (#845971)

    Thanks microbes! And with your pals the trees eating CO2 and thus eliminating global warming, pretty soon the tree huggers will have nothing left to bitch about. Mother nature... solving all the world's problems.

    • (Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Tuesday May 21 2019, @11:28PM (1 child)

      by linkdude64 (5482) on Tuesday May 21 2019, @11:28PM (#845976)

      Mother nature ...creating and solving all the world's problems.

      FTFY

      • (Score: 2) by choose another one on Wednesday May 22 2019, @07:56AM

        by choose another one (515) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday May 22 2019, @07:56AM (#846098)

        > Mother nature ...creating and solving all the world's problems.

        Yep, this. George Carlin explains it best: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c [youtube.com]

        The planet will be here for a long, long, long time after we’re gone and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself ’cuz that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed, and if it’s true that plastic is not degradable well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allows us to be spawned from it in the first place: it wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it, needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old philosophical question, “Why are we here?” “Plastic, assholes.”

    • (Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 21 2019, @11:55PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 21 2019, @11:55PM (#845988)

      Did you get hit with a synaptic dampener?

      "pretty soon the tree huggers will have nothing left to bitch about"

      Trees don't much care about plastic burning and they love the CO2. Think beyond 1st order effects if you don't wish to be mocked.

    • (Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Wednesday May 22 2019, @05:18PM

      by bobthecimmerian (6834) on Wednesday May 22 2019, @05:18PM (#846317)

      11% of billions of tons of plastic waste still leaves billions of tons of plastic waste. This is a good development, but not a fix.

      Increased CO2 by itself doesn't trigger enough plant growth to fix global warming. To grow plants need CO2, rich soil, and adequate water. Global warming will make more rain fall in some areas but less in others, make more water evaporate from land and end up in the ocean. And the increased number of hurricanes and cyclones hit so hard that rich soil gets washed away. So the increased CO2 in the atmosphere by itself won't boost plant growth enough to mean anything.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by gznork26 on Tuesday May 21 2019, @11:30PM (5 children)

    by gznork26 (1159) on Tuesday May 21 2019, @11:30PM (#845979) Homepage Journal

    Not all of the plastic that these critters might want to eat is waste yet. I'd imagine that if such things were cultivated and cajoled to eat specific kinds of plastics, they could be set loose on plastics that make modern life possible. I used a variation on this scenario in a series of short stories, where the microbes had a taste for the plastics used in the hulls of small boats, for example, or submerged flood control structures. The life expectancy of such plastics would be severely shortened, and the safety of using anything containing such plastics after they had been in seawater containing the microbes would be in question. Now imagine if microbes got a hankering for the insulation on undersea cables, for example. There are lots of ways that this could lead to trouble.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 21 2019, @11:39PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 21 2019, @11:39PM (#845981)

      There are lots of ways that this could lead to trouble.

      Stop using lead, aluminium is so much better, you'll get a smooth and less energy intensive way into trouble.
      A copper may also be efficient for the way there, but more expensive. Besides, coppers aren't a nice bunch to deal with.

    • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday May 22 2019, @04:28AM

      by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday May 22 2019, @04:28AM (#846051) Journal

      I think these microbes require an environment where they are surrounded by water. Probably salt water.

      OTOH, this process is probably rather slow. If it weren't, the plastic wouldn't stay in the ocean garbage patches. It's my expectation that they require the surface of the plastic that they are eating to be wet, though I suppose oily is an outside possibility. Otherwise they can't get at it to digest it. It's also not clear how complete a job they do. Perhaps they leave isolated benzene rings floating around or something.

      --
      Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
    • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday May 22 2019, @10:36AM

      by Phoenix666 (552) on Wednesday May 22 2019, @10:36AM (#846134) Journal

      Sure they could. Plastics have given us a chance to steal several marches on Mother Nature's corrosive effects. Rebuilding and repairing everything takes a hell of a lot of work, and plastics allow us to do less of it. It preserves our foods, our medicines, conducts our water, and does a thousand other things. There are non-plastic solutions to all of that, but they all work far less well. I wonder if the Carbon Age will come to replace plastics when we learn to affordably spin carbon nanotubes and graphene out of the CO2 in the atmosphere, but it's a utopian dream for the time being.

      --
      Washington DC delenda est.
    • (Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Wednesday May 22 2019, @05:21PM

      by bobthecimmerian (6834) on Wednesday May 22 2019, @05:21PM (#846318)

      There are a couple of novels based on this idea, like Ill Wind by Kevin J. Anderson.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 22 2019, @11:45PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 22 2019, @11:45PM (#846434)

      In that story it was metal eating insects (mosquitoes?) and plastic bags were the only thing that protected technology (used to protect their dna modification devices which were small pen sized devices.)

      Very much like that story, the human hubris about how to treat the planet and what was necessary vs unnecessary and gross versus not gross caused a whole variety of issues that eventually resulted in a return to the stone age as they destroyed all modern tech via biological means forcing everyone to live in bioengineered housing catered to by crafted beings who considered their creators as gods (and even so, thought up ways they could have left their 'bondage' but chose not to, because they liked their purposes and their lives, unlike the people they would be caring for.)

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by bob_super on Tuesday May 21 2019, @11:51PM (3 children)

    by bob_super (1357) on Tuesday May 21 2019, @11:51PM (#845985)

    Please edit away any "this", "these", "that" used in the present tabloid manner in article titles.
    In this particular case, as often, no substitution is even needed. The word is just there to drive clicks, because people are easily-manipulated morons.

    • (Score: 2) by krishnoid on Wednesday May 22 2019, @01:30AM

      by krishnoid (1156) on Wednesday May 22 2019, @01:30AM (#846015)

      It does help indicate that it's specific microbes, not just the ones that happen to be near the plastic in question. I propose the following instead: "These mouse-sized microbes are munching away at Plastic Waste in the Ocean."

    • (Score: 2) by deimtee on Wednesday May 22 2019, @07:17AM

      by deimtee (3272) on Wednesday May 22 2019, @07:17AM (#846081) Journal

      "Tiny" is pretty redundant too. If they weren't tiny then they wouldn't be microbes.

      --
      If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
    • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday May 22 2019, @10:32AM

      by Phoenix666 (552) on Wednesday May 22 2019, @10:32AM (#846131) Journal

      "Microbes Eat Plastic" is minimal and correct, but will you comment on it? Will anyone?

      We often had this discussion in the Slashdot days. Some complained that they only wanted straight up information. The vast majority laughed at them for reading the articles like noobs; it was the running joke that the guy who RTFA'd was the greenhorn. It was during Beta that everyone collectively realized that the discussion in the community was the value proposition that Dice could not fathom. So it is here.

      Yeah, clickbait titles are irritating. But it's the grit that causes the oyster to produce the pearl.

      --
      Washington DC delenda est.
  • (Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 22 2019, @12:45AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 22 2019, @12:45AM (#845998)

    They might start eating house-hold items like desks and compu ~^ &};~ [NO CARRIER]

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 22 2019, @01:05AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 22 2019, @01:05AM (#846006)

    Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater
    Kit Pedler, Gerry Davis.
    A microbe designed to eat waste plastic gets loose.

    CYA

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 22 2019, @08:49AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 22 2019, @08:49AM (#846108)

    Is that a sign of peak plastic scare, and a switch to a new eco-bogeyman is in the works?

  • (Score: 1) by Goghit on Wednesday May 22 2019, @02:39PM (1 child)

    by Goghit (6530) on Wednesday May 22 2019, @02:39PM (#846219)

    And on land we have the larvae of wax moths https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waxworm [wikipedia.org] A right pain in the arse they are, since while a couple of species will eat plastic they prefer beehive wax. They're a pain to work with since they like to chew their way out of things like cheap, easily available yoghurt containers.

    Unlike the bacteria these things are edible and have a high fat content so they might actually be tasty.

    • (Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Wednesday May 22 2019, @02:50PM

      by ElizabethGreene (6748) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday May 22 2019, @02:50PM (#846229) Journal

      On a related note, I've observed mealworms eating expanded polystyrene foam, but I don't know how to determine if they gain any nutrition from it.

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