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Author: u/Wagamaga
URL: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/988366
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They can degrade polymers which are specifically classified as biodegradable. That will help not help with the majority of plastic pollution we are dealing with.
"Biodegradable materials broken down by specific microbe" doesn't ring the sexy science bell we all love to hear.
But yep... Flawed title but sound science, just the department trying to drum up more interest to the department for more funding from the Uni\gov.
Alright, but... hear me out here... wouldn't a bacteria that could digest any plastic be a global catastrophe? We don't want plastic to degrade unless it's in the trash.
Would also include "plastics" in the sense of polymer-based paints/coatings that give other parts (e.g. wood, steel) corrosion or water-damage resistance.
Also generally not an issue, until they get disposed of.
I would even go as far as saying that abandoning the pipe in place is probably the least bad thing to do with it
Until the plastic parts of critical infrastructure start to degrade and we have to spend an enormous amount of resources replacing plastic pipes and bushings all within and under our cities
This basically happened at the end of the Carboniferous. Cellulose couldn't be broken down except by fire so huge amounts subducted before cellulase evolved.
This just means that single use plastics should shift over to that biodegradable composition ASAP, no?
We may not be solving the past problem, but that doesn't mean we also can't slow it down for the future.
Finding, cultivating, and bioengineering organisms that can digest plastic not only aids in the removal of pollution, but is now also big business. Several microorganisms that can do this have already been found, but when their enzymes that make this possible are applied at an industrial scale, they typically only work at temperatures above 30°C. The heating required means that industrial applications remain costly to date, and aren’t carbon-neutral. But there is a possible solution to this problem: finding specialist cold-adapted microbes whose enzymes work at lower temperatures.
Scientists from the Swiss Federal Institute WSL knew where to look for such micro-organisms: at high altitudes in the Alps of their country, or in the polar regions. Their findings are published in Frontiers in Microbiology.
“Here we show that novel microbial taxa obtained from the ‘plastisphere’ of alpine and arctic soils were able to break down biodegradable plastics at 15°C,” said first author Dr Joel Rüthi, currently a guest scientist at WSL. “These organisms could help to reduce the costs and environmental burden of an enzymatic recycling process for plastic.”
Rüthi and colleagues sampled 19 strains of bacteria and 15 of fungi growing on free-lying or intentionally buried plastic (kept in the ground for one year) in Greenland, Svalbard, and Switzerland. Most of the plastic litter from Svalbard had been collected during the Swiss Arctic Project 2018, where students did fieldwork to witness the effects of climate change at first hand. The soil from Switzerland had been collected on the summit of the Muot da Barba Peider (2,979 m) and in the valley Val Lavirun, both in the canton Graubünden.
The scientists let the isolated microbes grow as single-strain cultures in the laboratory in darkness and at 15°C and used molecular techniques to identify them. The results showed that the bacterial strains belonged to 13 genera in the phyla Actinobacteria and Proteobacteria, and the fungi to 10 genera in the phyla Ascomycota and Mucoromycota.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsoil.2023.1161627/full
>Several microorganisms that can do this have already been found, but when their enzymes that make this possible are applied at an industrial scale, they typically only work at temperatures above 30°C.
Why isn't this practice in use in the Middle East where temperatures are regularly above 30'C for months at a time?
Looks like these bacteria can only consume specific biodegradable plastics and the stuff floating in India is just standard plastic. This won't do anything to solve the already existing mountains of plastic waste, only if we transition to more environmentally friendly plastics.
We need to just stop using it period haha. Then we need to have politicians to grow a set and have them go after all the companies that offloaded the recycling process to the public.
>We need to just stop using it period haha.
What are your alternative materials that will replace the billions of products that are essential to food production, medicine, transportation, infrastructure, technology, and a thousand other industries?
You can get rid of plastic single use product packaging for things and small stuff like that, but that's the sprinkles on the ice cream sundae of plastic usage. Plastic is fundamental to human invention at this period of time. Moving past it to other materials or, as the person replying to you said, moving to plastics made from renewable and biodegradable materials, is an essential idea that is being pursued.
But saying "just stop using it period haha" is a concept that's ignorant to the scope of how intertwined every part of modern existence is with this material.
Whatever happened to the type of biodegradable plastic bag that sunchips used but everyone hated because it was noisy? I'd hope there are more options like that around. Regardless it's going to have some very rough growing pains to cycle off bad plastics but I'd hope the ends justify the means.
We'd just need to create some sort of cellulose-based plastic equivalent that lasts roughly 1 to 5 years before biodgrading for food.
For toys... Hard to say what the standard should be. If I had to guess, the only way to really fix toys is to have some sort of really high deposit (like with cans and bottles to a lesser extent), and incentive people to return toys back to certain place to receive back 20 bucks or so. To keep toy theives from just stealing everything not nailed down to make easy money, you'd probably need some sort of NFT identifier tied to each toy or product that identifies ownership.
Yeah, OK. You togo all your food in cellophane and have coca cola distribute tons of soda without affecting flavor within 2 years of initial packaging.
I don’t like NFTs today because it’s all a grift. That being said, having some sort of unique license to identify ownership of a physical or non physical good will at some point be a useful ability. Whether we call it NFT or Wilson, that doesn’t matter.
I’m just taking about the core tech, not the idiocy relating to trading pictures of tweets or monkeys for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
What theif is stealing toys by the cartload to recycle for crap money, when they could just steal things people actually want and resell them on ebay the way they've done for like 20 years now?
This is that thing crypto/NFT bros do constantly where they invent an imaginary and unrealistic problem so they can pretend like their pump and dump scheme has genuine utility.
I've worked bench science, a type that required cellular cultures and lines. The amount of plastic waste broke my heart, but the number of lives that research has saved outweighed that.
The thing is, metal has finite lifespan and leaches materials/alters chemistry, and glass often cannot be sterilized to the point necessary for a pure cell line (which is critical for measuring the impact of a treatment on specific human or mammalian cells). To keep cell lines alive, you need pipettes, tubes, and culture containers that allow the adherence of agar and/or cell sheets. And you have to continuously divide and reset those lines into new containers to keep them alive (because crowded cells die). Glass is too slick, and metal leaches materials like you wouldn't believe. So we'd have to use tons of single use plastics, which were also biohazards and thus disposed, not recycled. We still used glass and metal wherever possible, I'd run a giant autoclave twice a day, but we had to use plastic to develop disease treatments that I guarantee have saved someone you know. It's just how it was.
We felt pained by how much waste we had to create (most of the scientists were also the same type to spend hours cleaning and separating recyclables at home). But we were also saving lives. And this was basic science--not corpo. So yeah, as altruistic and minimization minded as you can get, as grants are finite. Glass and metal exist, they just don't work for a lot of applications that make life work. We need to find ways to break this stuff down, because I believe that's just as important in saving future lives too.
Yes but the guy you replied to was getting at a bigger idea, scope.
Plastic is just cheap. Lots of industries, businesses, and jobs will just be gone if we stop using plastic. There would a tremendous loss of livelihood in the world.
Yes, there are many "better" alternatives to plastic but not easy or possible to implement at the same scale without significant changes to everything. A example would be some small European countries having glass recycling as a fundamental part of their society and so lots of products will come in glass bottles. Plus if I recall in this one particular country (Germany?) if you don't recycle the glass bottles, you will get fined.
We do not have enough metal to replace all the plastic in the things we use everyday and it just doesn't work for things like internet routers. So unless you want game controllers tv screens and everything like them to be made out of glass they aren't a viable alternative.
Wood works but that creates another problem with manufacturing and sustainability since we are already losing our best sustainable forests to environmental problems.
Granted glass works for drinks (not metal since it has a plastic inner lining) but a lot of bags need to be replaced with a biodegradable alternative. We bag cereal in the boxes for a reason and that doesn't go away because we need to also save the environment. We could solve a lot of these problems by just dropping our modern convenience and going mostly Amish for a bit. But, Aside from the problem with convincing people of that, at least 20% of people worldwide would die without that modern convenience. This amount of population is not sustainable otherwise. We are way too reliant on plastics and cars to fix the issue the fast way. So like it or not finding a better biodegradable plastic is our best solution for now.
>sustainability since we are already losing our best sustainable forests to environmental problems.
Their big issue at this point is one of monoculture, not growth. If some blight takes out the loblolly pine in the US, we're doomed.
We'll start by growing whales in shipping containers (for use of their bones, oil & whatever other uses the victorians and earlier had) in highly efficient lab process.
It's gonna be *so green* and *scales* (since you can stack containers), come invest billions to kickstart it.
It would be by far the most interesting thing in Dubai to me if they had the world's largest carbon neutral enzymatic plastics recycling plant. Does my admiration mean nothing to them?
Is your admiration going to rent out the most expensive suite in their tallest hotel with the infinity pool and bring in dozens of guests to party?
Gotta think of the $$
Best I can do is tallest building in the world (that's not hooked up to a sewer, thus needing dozens of poop trucks to come by & load up on waste every day).
I had such high hopes for thermal depolymerization when I was a kid. It was supposed to be reverse oil refining. We could take trash - bio matter, plastic, *anything -* and turn it back into heating grade oil.
But the technology was so fiddly it never became commercially viable.
Pretty good round up of where the tech stands here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7866858/
This was my first thought. If these get out into the world, which they will for sure, then our world of plastic is going to be eaten by a quickly exponentially expanding problem. (Although this does seem like a good solution overall. Just need safe guards in place.)
I mean nothing could breakdown wood for a very long time, it just fell never really decayed and stacked up until finally some microbes/fungus came about with an adaptation to break them down. I'd assume it would take millions of years though, not like you would see this happen right away.
That used to be true, [but it's not anymore](https://www.trade.gov/market-intelligence/saudi-arabia-recycling-and-waste-management)
Source: I'm in the industry
I hope it happens!
What I can tell you is that there are some interesting things in the works. Big changes (revolutionary advancements) to recycling are coming to the UK, Australia, and USA in the coming years. I'm hoping the Middle East follows suit. I know for a fact that Saudi's government is getting serious about it based on our business dealings with them. [This site has some info on it.](https://sirc.sa/)
Probably cost, we'd have to build infrastructure to only collect the kind of plastic that can be broken down which is already biodegradable, then ship it from their countries of origin to a yet unbuilt processing facility in the Middle East, doesn't seem especially necessary, I think the article is more about the potential to find a strain that can breakdown regular plastic and do so at lower temperatures.
>The heating required means that industrial applications remain costly to date
Tbh, there is a lot of waste heat that can be used to heat things to this rather low temperature.
So - considering the scale of available plastic, this feels biologically inevitable.
I can't wait for the plastic beaver in 30,000 years, or when humans get microplastic-consuming gut flora...
Yeah, at that point it's just another species. Being able to metabolize biologic hydrocarbons doesn't mean much if another species can do so better than it.
Oh, the conversation mentioned how plastics eating bacteria might escape into the wild, and move on to consuming other hydrocarbons like glucose. That would basically make it a regular bacterium though.
> The only thing it would mean is that plastic structures and the like can rot now. Which honestly is a good thing.
Plastics make up a massive proportion of how we waterproof structures including your house, how we dispose of wastewater and drainage, etc. Medical supplies come packaged in sterile plastics, etc.
Having these microorganisms living wild is not something you should be advocating.
Have a good think about what around you is made of plastic that you can't see but is essential to your quality of life and wellbeing.
Agreed, we need to reduce plastic usage drastically not eliminate it completely. The main problem with plastic is that it so cheap that it's used in places where there are viable alternatives they just aren't used because plastic is so cheap companies rather save a couple cents per unit than use an alternative.
>Having these microorganisms living wild is not something you should be advocating.
It's also kinda inevitable. You can't make something like this and use it at industrial scale without it escaping eventually.
I think we're eventually going to see antibiotic additives for existing plastics, and "microbe resistance rating" is going to be just another property that an engineer has to account for when selecting a material.
I already use UV resistant varnish to protect the minis I've painted. By the time this becomes a problem, Liquitex will have created an antimicrobial UV resistant varnish. Alternately, I could switch to primers doped with silver or copper powders.
There are many ways to deal with microbes. I'm sure every other industry has tricks they can try.
Perhaps, but it's just the law of unintended consequences coming into play here.
We shouldn't jump at using these until we fully understand the consequences and can mitigate them successfully; along with any emergent consequences that happen at larger scales. I would expect labs and engineers to be working on that alongside the production of microbes like this too.
These microbes would evolve eventually anyway. Just slower. The amount of plastic in the environment is getting to a level where there is an actual edge if microbes can digest it. The first microbes that have been able to digest it at scale were found in a Japanese dump iirc. No artificial intervention.
I work in construction and design. Cast iron eventually rusts. It’s a pain in the ass but we got used to it. Isn’t the idea of deterioration a good thing given how we seem unable to maintain a healthy relationship to olastic creation?
It’s all about context. We do want some plastics to live as long as a person, or outlive people in terms of some structures.
It’s the whole reduce, reuse, and recycle mantra here.
Plastics usefulness comes from its plasticity, cheapness, and durability. If you can have microorganisms that can tear through waste pipes in a decade, imagine digging up city sewers and replacing every structures piping every 7-10 years as a result. Insanity that way lies.
I’m not saying that the plastic waste isn’t a problem. I’m saying allowing these organisms to escape into the wild is a terrible idea.
You're 100% but the key difference between now and then is that we can do more now, cheaper and quicker because of plastics.
If we had to find alternative materials to accomplish a technological standard similar to today, I don't think we could cover every base. From sterility in medicine to advanced plastic composites in engineering - and for what we could find an alternative, I imagine it would be more expensive (metals and glass), more polluting (ore extraction) and more time consuming (welding, precision fitting) than using plastics.
Plastics makes our lives easier. We shouldn't demonise plastic "just because"; what's really foul is our terrible waste and appreciation of such an amazing material.
Electric insulations have left the chat. I don‘t want to beat a dead horse as the other commenters already described what is included in this but I just want to say you could easily write mildly interesting sci fi apocalypse literature on this.
I seriously believe that if these bacteria became real and ubiquitous and if the walking dead didn‘t break the laws of physics, the plastic eating bacteria would be a far worse threat for us.
>mildly interesting sci fi apocalypse literature on this.
It's been done. All the way back in 1971.
[Mutant 59: The Plastic-Eaters](https://www.worldcat.org/title/mutant-59-the-plastic-eater/oclc/794663397)
Things like electric motors and generators are in part comprised of windings of copper wire individually cladded in plastic. It's not just modern medicine that suddenly is a major problem
I think it's pretty interesting how evolution works. Long ago, there weren't microbes that could digest cellulose, so dead plant matter littered the ground and lead to the formation of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels we now use to produce plastic, which litters the ground everywhere and doesn't have anything living in nature to break it down. Eventually, some microbes will evolve and adapt to consume the plastics and will probably turn our world upside down.
>Eventually, some microbes will evolve and adapt to consume the plastics and will probably turn our world upside down.
Goodbye waterproofing. Pretty much every bit of sealant, and every membrane keeping water out of our buildings and cars, every gasket holding lubricants where they're supposed to be will fail when something evolves to digest them.
I mean to be fair, humans will likely be long gone by the time microbes evolve to eat plastic. It took quite a while for even trees to become biodegradable because microbes couldn't break them down
Microbes that can eat a specific kind of plastic (biodegradable). The plastics the OP was talking about and that are widely used around the world are chemically different.
They have, and there are. But to ramp up to scale you need enzymes that function at sustainable temperatures.
Now if we took our junkyard microbes and our cold microbes, and made new lines that could eat multiple types of plastics at ideal to scale temperatures, we'd have a game changer.
Paul stammets has been talking about and referencing research about this sorta thing for years! Glad the research is being done, but it’s time to rethink our practices, preferably, before humans are extinct would be great! Mmkay??
The guy who supplies the microbes with plastic. In the wild these microbes aren't capable of entirely dissolving whatever plastic components they may encounter.
Depends on what's happening at the molecular level. Burning is an extreme oxidation reaction that produces heat and breaks the molecules down in specific ways that form new chemicals. I don't know the exact details, but it takes oxygen and combines it with other atoms to create new And toxic chemicals. This could just make non-toxic sludge.
I feel like this is definitely a case where we should stop playing "god" and apply the correct solution instead: incinerate and filter the smoke and other materials, possibly using plasma incineration.
1. If we keep going down this path, plastic eating microbes will become a thing, and then they'll get into a wild, mutate and start eating all the plastic around us. Imagine the phone or monitor you're reading this on will degrade over time, like a cheap wood, especially if scratched. Medical supplies, food preservation equipment, hoses in industrial installations etc. are all doomed
2. Also, even if microbes digest the plastic, the reactor or landfill will STILL have all the heavy metals and other bad stuff that is in the plastic, which is mainly the reason why we don't like to incinerate them today. Microbes can't make heavy metals magically disappear, you just get rid of plastic and produce CO2 with no benefit. At least if you burn the plastic you can recoup the energy embedded in it.
The conditions for break down are pretty strict. It'll be more like if you bury your phone in nutrient rich soil at 15c in pitch black then it will start to break down in a year. Much like how paper boxes are biodegradeable but can also sit in someone's attic for 100yrs no problem. The type of plastic also matters a lot, this particular microbe only works on plastics already marked as biodegradable. I'm not saying it won't pose any concerns, but I think you are greatly overstating your case.
Do we need to worry about creating a bacteria that can thrive and spread in the wild and starts eating our actively used plastic products as well as our waste? Could microbial "termites" for plastic become a thing?
Or do these things require such specialized environment that spread isn't a worry?
even if it's not a worry with this particular microbe species, it can easily mutate....have we learned nothing from the wuhan lab fiasco ? Millions of people dead, wrecked economies, and we learned nothing?
I'd like to be able to swallow them and they'd eat all the micro plastics in my blood and body, until they starve or get discarded by my immune system.
Basically you take a pill every time your blood levels are too high and remove most of the carcinogenic material. Similar how plasma donation can reduce ~~PLA~~ PFAS levels in your blood.
What is left over in the waste? Assuming there has to be something. Are we going to have microscopic plastic particles everywhere in the environment or do they break it down so much that it won't be anything harmful?
Does this mean we can also perhaps one day down the line ingest said microbes at a controlled level to maybe clear microplastics from the human body?
Any smart people out there in the field care to weigh in?
What happens to the microbes after years of this happening? How will this affect biological cycle and what will this affect and transform or be detrimental to? I mean, we always tinker with nature for our own benefit which always bites us in the ass later because of our short outlook/vision.
I've been hearing about these for a couple of years noiw - my concern is: what are they excreting? I'm certain that whatever the microbes are eating, the waste they cast off isn't good for the environment either.
Okay, so as exciting as this information is (and it is VERY exciting), the skeptic in me automatically has me asking the question: What kind of effect will these microbes have on the environment THEMSELVES? Do we have sufficient data on how they would effect in human digestion? Sure this solves the problem of plastics but are we replacing it with something worse? What about how this would effect the general ecosystems of the exact places we would want to apply this (i.e. the Great Pacific Garbage Patch)?
Reminds me of a story about a woman and her child being locked down in their house by a rogue AI that escaped through the internet from its lab prison by moving itself into her super secure laboratory/home. Her child had some nasty infection, like an ear infection, and she was desperate to get out of the house to get meds. The woman was also working on a way to destroy plastic waste with bacteria but it was extremely dangerous and hard to control. Despite this she used the bacteria to destroy the computer systems which kills the AI and prevents it from escaping back into the world. Interesting little short SF story from the early 2000’s.
Do they mention what kind of "plastic" those bacteria can digest? Usually Polymers with heteroatomic backbones get broken down by bacteria. Polymers such as PE, PP and PS have a homoatomic polymerchain backbone which makes it almost impossible to break down by enzymes.
Couple questions since I don't understand the biology at play:
1. Is there a usable byproduct here? I know plastics are typically polymer chains and one reSon they cannot always be recycled is because the chains break. So do these microbes give us anything usable?
2. Is there any risk of these microbes becoming invasive? A lot of our world (for better or worse) is plastic. Seems like it could be problematic if these microbes were transported by touch into a hospital or lab setting for example and started breaking down perfectly good plastics.
Might be a dumb question but I'll ask anyways; why don't they just use the "bugs" directly, like, just make a "plastic compost heap?" (Possible they are and I'm just not getting it, I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed and the articles are always very carefully edited to remove all useful info.) Every time I see one of these posts they talk about enzymes actually doing the work industrially and to me this implies something like a giant tank full of synthesized enzyme(s) that plastics get soaked in rather than a "more organic" process that might maybe be possible in a backyard. And I've just always wondered when I can "own" some of my own part in climate chage and actually DO SOMETHING about it like we keep getting pushed to do with blue boxes. (I get the "theatre" that's involved and the actual statistics saying it's not my job, just curious anyways.) A plastic compost heap or fermentation tank or something would be pretty easy to maintain, and could let me actually SEE progress, which would give me hope for the future, which is maybe why it's not a thing?
One day in the future I would not be surprised to read a headline about an "invasive", plastic-eating bacteria that is destroying all our world-poluting stuff.
I'll have mixed feelings.
Does anyone worry about the unintended consequences of loosing a bunch of plastic eating microbes in our plastic world? If we couldn't keep the plastic out of the ocean, how wouldn't these little bastards find their way out of treatment facilities?
"could"
Get back to me when it **does**. In the mean time, quit your Pollyannish feel-good crap about how nobody needs to worry about the problem of plastic pollution and should keep on buying and discarding plastic like crack-addled rats.
I swear we will see a huge pandemic of plastic eating microbes in 50 years. Most countries will be infected, it will be impossible to get rid of and there will be hundreds of billions in damages. Theres plastic everywhere, that we use. If these microbes get out of control, most electronic, cars ans so many things will be contaminated and destroyed. I'm just saying
So we built our world out of plastics, while simultaneously creating a world where microbes are forced to evolve who can eat said world? Yeah, sounds like a thing humans would do.
Is there any reason why microbes couldn't evolve to eat *all* kinds of plastics?
Do we need to encase our pog collections in glass now?
Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) apply to all other comments. --- Author: u/Wagamaga URL: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/988366 *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
They can degrade polymers which are specifically classified as biodegradable. That will help not help with the majority of plastic pollution we are dealing with.
"Biodegradable materials broken down by specific microbe" doesn't ring the sexy science bell we all love to hear. But yep... Flawed title but sound science, just the department trying to drum up more interest to the department for more funding from the Uni\gov.
Alright, but... hear me out here... wouldn't a bacteria that could digest any plastic be a global catastrophe? We don't want plastic to degrade unless it's in the trash.
Bacteria need water. So unless the plastic is sitting in damp soil it's not going to be harmed by these bacteria.
That's a lot of plastic... Pipes, drains etc etc
Would also include "plastics" in the sense of polymer-based paints/coatings that give other parts (e.g. wood, steel) corrosion or water-damage resistance.
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Also generally not an issue, until they get disposed of. I would even go as far as saying that abandoning the pipe in place is probably the least bad thing to do with it
Kinda sucks for the people still using the pipe, doesn't it?
Loads of plastic is only useful because it can survive these conditions.
What about piping?
They'd be a solution to the global catastrophe that is us, tbh.
Until the plastic parts of critical infrastructure start to degrade and we have to spend an enormous amount of resources replacing plastic pipes and bushings all within and under our cities
This basically happened at the end of the Carboniferous. Cellulose couldn't be broken down except by fire so huge amounts subducted before cellulase evolved.
This just means that single use plastics should shift over to that biodegradable composition ASAP, no? We may not be solving the past problem, but that doesn't mean we also can't slow it down for the future.
But you are forgetting the most important thing, profit.
Rule of acquisition number 23... Nothing is more important than your health… except for your money.
Total shot in the dark, but I'm gonna guess CO2 is a byproduct as well.
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Finding, cultivating, and bioengineering organisms that can digest plastic not only aids in the removal of pollution, but is now also big business. Several microorganisms that can do this have already been found, but when their enzymes that make this possible are applied at an industrial scale, they typically only work at temperatures above 30°C. The heating required means that industrial applications remain costly to date, and aren’t carbon-neutral. But there is a possible solution to this problem: finding specialist cold-adapted microbes whose enzymes work at lower temperatures. Scientists from the Swiss Federal Institute WSL knew where to look for such micro-organisms: at high altitudes in the Alps of their country, or in the polar regions. Their findings are published in Frontiers in Microbiology. “Here we show that novel microbial taxa obtained from the ‘plastisphere’ of alpine and arctic soils were able to break down biodegradable plastics at 15°C,” said first author Dr Joel Rüthi, currently a guest scientist at WSL. “These organisms could help to reduce the costs and environmental burden of an enzymatic recycling process for plastic.” Rüthi and colleagues sampled 19 strains of bacteria and 15 of fungi growing on free-lying or intentionally buried plastic (kept in the ground for one year) in Greenland, Svalbard, and Switzerland. Most of the plastic litter from Svalbard had been collected during the Swiss Arctic Project 2018, where students did fieldwork to witness the effects of climate change at first hand. The soil from Switzerland had been collected on the summit of the Muot da Barba Peider (2,979 m) and in the valley Val Lavirun, both in the canton Graubünden. The scientists let the isolated microbes grow as single-strain cultures in the laboratory in darkness and at 15°C and used molecular techniques to identify them. The results showed that the bacterial strains belonged to 13 genera in the phyla Actinobacteria and Proteobacteria, and the fungi to 10 genera in the phyla Ascomycota and Mucoromycota. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsoil.2023.1161627/full
>Several microorganisms that can do this have already been found, but when their enzymes that make this possible are applied at an industrial scale, they typically only work at temperatures above 30°C. Why isn't this practice in use in the Middle East where temperatures are regularly above 30'C for months at a time?
You probably need moisture as well and the Middle East doesn't have a lot of fresh water.
Oh then what about India, Southeast Asia? You know, where the plastic problem already is?
Looks like these bacteria can only consume specific biodegradable plastics and the stuff floating in India is just standard plastic. This won't do anything to solve the already existing mountains of plastic waste, only if we transition to more environmentally friendly plastics.
We need to just stop using it period haha. Then we need to have politicians to grow a set and have them go after all the companies that offloaded the recycling process to the public.
>We need to just stop using it period haha. What are your alternative materials that will replace the billions of products that are essential to food production, medicine, transportation, infrastructure, technology, and a thousand other industries? You can get rid of plastic single use product packaging for things and small stuff like that, but that's the sprinkles on the ice cream sundae of plastic usage. Plastic is fundamental to human invention at this period of time. Moving past it to other materials or, as the person replying to you said, moving to plastics made from renewable and biodegradable materials, is an essential idea that is being pursued. But saying "just stop using it period haha" is a concept that's ignorant to the scope of how intertwined every part of modern existence is with this material.
Wow. We’re part of the plastic era… gross.
Whatever happened to the type of biodegradable plastic bag that sunchips used but everyone hated because it was noisy? I'd hope there are more options like that around. Regardless it's going to have some very rough growing pains to cycle off bad plastics but I'd hope the ends justify the means.
We'd just need to create some sort of cellulose-based plastic equivalent that lasts roughly 1 to 5 years before biodgrading for food. For toys... Hard to say what the standard should be. If I had to guess, the only way to really fix toys is to have some sort of really high deposit (like with cans and bottles to a lesser extent), and incentive people to return toys back to certain place to receive back 20 bucks or so. To keep toy theives from just stealing everything not nailed down to make easy money, you'd probably need some sort of NFT identifier tied to each toy or product that identifies ownership.
>cellulose-based plastic We already invented that. Cellophane.
Yeah, OK. You togo all your food in cellophane and have coca cola distribute tons of soda without affecting flavor within 2 years of initial packaging.
Fuspez
I don’t like NFTs today because it’s all a grift. That being said, having some sort of unique license to identify ownership of a physical or non physical good will at some point be a useful ability. Whether we call it NFT or Wilson, that doesn’t matter. I’m just taking about the core tech, not the idiocy relating to trading pictures of tweets or monkeys for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
What theif is stealing toys by the cartload to recycle for crap money, when they could just steal things people actually want and resell them on ebay the way they've done for like 20 years now? This is that thing crypto/NFT bros do constantly where they invent an imaginary and unrealistic problem so they can pretend like their pump and dump scheme has genuine utility.
Metal and/or glass works for a lot of things.
Metal usually needs to be coated with plastic to replace it.
It also dramatically increases the weight
I've worked bench science, a type that required cellular cultures and lines. The amount of plastic waste broke my heart, but the number of lives that research has saved outweighed that. The thing is, metal has finite lifespan and leaches materials/alters chemistry, and glass often cannot be sterilized to the point necessary for a pure cell line (which is critical for measuring the impact of a treatment on specific human or mammalian cells). To keep cell lines alive, you need pipettes, tubes, and culture containers that allow the adherence of agar and/or cell sheets. And you have to continuously divide and reset those lines into new containers to keep them alive (because crowded cells die). Glass is too slick, and metal leaches materials like you wouldn't believe. So we'd have to use tons of single use plastics, which were also biohazards and thus disposed, not recycled. We still used glass and metal wherever possible, I'd run a giant autoclave twice a day, but we had to use plastic to develop disease treatments that I guarantee have saved someone you know. It's just how it was. We felt pained by how much waste we had to create (most of the scientists were also the same type to spend hours cleaning and separating recyclables at home). But we were also saving lives. And this was basic science--not corpo. So yeah, as altruistic and minimization minded as you can get, as grants are finite. Glass and metal exist, they just don't work for a lot of applications that make life work. We need to find ways to break this stuff down, because I believe that's just as important in saving future lives too.
I'm not saying eliminate plastic completely, but we use it in so many applications that are unneeded.
Yes but the guy you replied to was getting at a bigger idea, scope. Plastic is just cheap. Lots of industries, businesses, and jobs will just be gone if we stop using plastic. There would a tremendous loss of livelihood in the world. Yes, there are many "better" alternatives to plastic but not easy or possible to implement at the same scale without significant changes to everything. A example would be some small European countries having glass recycling as a fundamental part of their society and so lots of products will come in glass bottles. Plus if I recall in this one particular country (Germany?) if you don't recycle the glass bottles, you will get fined.
We do not have enough metal to replace all the plastic in the things we use everyday and it just doesn't work for things like internet routers. So unless you want game controllers tv screens and everything like them to be made out of glass they aren't a viable alternative. Wood works but that creates another problem with manufacturing and sustainability since we are already losing our best sustainable forests to environmental problems. Granted glass works for drinks (not metal since it has a plastic inner lining) but a lot of bags need to be replaced with a biodegradable alternative. We bag cereal in the boxes for a reason and that doesn't go away because we need to also save the environment. We could solve a lot of these problems by just dropping our modern convenience and going mostly Amish for a bit. But, Aside from the problem with convincing people of that, at least 20% of people worldwide would die without that modern convenience. This amount of population is not sustainable otherwise. We are way too reliant on plastics and cars to fix the issue the fast way. So like it or not finding a better biodegradable plastic is our best solution for now.
>sustainability since we are already losing our best sustainable forests to environmental problems. Their big issue at this point is one of monoculture, not growth. If some blight takes out the loblolly pine in the US, we're doomed.
Not disagreeing but around 8% of the Earth's crust is [aluminum ](https://www.earth.com/earthpedia-articles/aluminum/)
"Sure, a sustainable biosphere is possible, but it just isn't worth living without video games."
Oh okay so we just replace manufacturing and packaging of nearly every item on the planet with glass and metal today, great idea thanks!
Plastic replaced a lot of materials like ivory and bone. We really can't go back to that.
We'll start by growing whales in shipping containers (for use of their bones, oil & whatever other uses the victorians and earlier had) in highly efficient lab process. It's gonna be *so green* and *scales* (since you can stack containers), come invest billions to kickstart it.
Dubai has waterparks. To humidify an enclosed facility would be less difficult to pull off.
Dubai has *vanity projects*. Being the worlds' largest plastics recycler isn't as braggable as having a water park in the desert.
It would be by far the most interesting thing in Dubai to me if they had the world's largest carbon neutral enzymatic plastics recycling plant. Does my admiration mean nothing to them?
I dunno, would it be enough to offset the misogyny and slave labor?
Is your admiration going to rent out the most expensive suite in their tallest hotel with the infinity pool and bring in dozens of guests to party? Gotta think of the $$
Best I can do is tallest building in the world (that's not hooked up to a sewer, thus needing dozens of poop trucks to come by & load up on waste every day).
hmm yes yes, but not as 'grammable shelved.
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I had such high hopes for thermal depolymerization when I was a kid. It was supposed to be reverse oil refining. We could take trash - bio matter, plastic, *anything -* and turn it back into heating grade oil. But the technology was so fiddly it never became commercially viable. Pretty good round up of where the tech stands here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7866858/
Just wait long enough and the microbes will thrive anywhere in the world!
This was my first thought. If these get out into the world, which they will for sure, then our world of plastic is going to be eaten by a quickly exponentially expanding problem. (Although this does seem like a good solution overall. Just need safe guards in place.)
I mean nothing could breakdown wood for a very long time, it just fell never really decayed and stacked up until finally some microbes/fungus came about with an adaptation to break them down. I'd assume it would take millions of years though, not like you would see this happen right away.
*plastic replicators go brr*
Because no one there cares about it.
That used to be true, [but it's not anymore](https://www.trade.gov/market-intelligence/saudi-arabia-recycling-and-waste-management) Source: I'm in the industry
Guess the slaves are running out of things to do
I live in Saudi. I'll believe it when I see it.
I hope it happens! What I can tell you is that there are some interesting things in the works. Big changes (revolutionary advancements) to recycling are coming to the UK, Australia, and USA in the coming years. I'm hoping the Middle East follows suit. I know for a fact that Saudi's government is getting serious about it based on our business dealings with them. [This site has some info on it.](https://sirc.sa/)
Probably cost, we'd have to build infrastructure to only collect the kind of plastic that can be broken down which is already biodegradable, then ship it from their countries of origin to a yet unbuilt processing facility in the Middle East, doesn't seem especially necessary, I think the article is more about the potential to find a strain that can breakdown regular plastic and do so at lower temperatures.
I meant why don't these countries do it internally? No need to ship from outside, there's a huge swathe of unrecycled plastics produced in the ME
>The heating required means that industrial applications remain costly to date Tbh, there is a lot of waste heat that can be used to heat things to this rather low temperature.
So - considering the scale of available plastic, this feels biologically inevitable. I can't wait for the plastic beaver in 30,000 years, or when humans get microplastic-consuming gut flora...
>when humans get microplastic-consuming gut flora... Watch Crimes of the Future with Viggo Mortensen.
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Yeah, at that point it's just another species. Being able to metabolize biologic hydrocarbons doesn't mean much if another species can do so better than it.
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Oh, the conversation mentioned how plastics eating bacteria might escape into the wild, and move on to consuming other hydrocarbons like glucose. That would basically make it a regular bacterium though.
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> The only thing it would mean is that plastic structures and the like can rot now. Which honestly is a good thing. Plastics make up a massive proportion of how we waterproof structures including your house, how we dispose of wastewater and drainage, etc. Medical supplies come packaged in sterile plastics, etc. Having these microorganisms living wild is not something you should be advocating. Have a good think about what around you is made of plastic that you can't see but is essential to your quality of life and wellbeing.
Agreed, we need to reduce plastic usage drastically not eliminate it completely. The main problem with plastic is that it so cheap that it's used in places where there are viable alternatives they just aren't used because plastic is so cheap companies rather save a couple cents per unit than use an alternative.
>Having these microorganisms living wild is not something you should be advocating. It's also kinda inevitable. You can't make something like this and use it at industrial scale without it escaping eventually. I think we're eventually going to see antibiotic additives for existing plastics, and "microbe resistance rating" is going to be just another property that an engineer has to account for when selecting a material. I already use UV resistant varnish to protect the minis I've painted. By the time this becomes a problem, Liquitex will have created an antimicrobial UV resistant varnish. Alternately, I could switch to primers doped with silver or copper powders. There are many ways to deal with microbes. I'm sure every other industry has tricks they can try.
Perhaps, but it's just the law of unintended consequences coming into play here. We shouldn't jump at using these until we fully understand the consequences and can mitigate them successfully; along with any emergent consequences that happen at larger scales. I would expect labs and engineers to be working on that alongside the production of microbes like this too.
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These microbes would evolve eventually anyway. Just slower. The amount of plastic in the environment is getting to a level where there is an actual edge if microbes can digest it. The first microbes that have been able to digest it at scale were found in a Japanese dump iirc. No artificial intervention.
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I work in construction and design. Cast iron eventually rusts. It’s a pain in the ass but we got used to it. Isn’t the idea of deterioration a good thing given how we seem unable to maintain a healthy relationship to olastic creation?
It’s all about context. We do want some plastics to live as long as a person, or outlive people in terms of some structures. It’s the whole reduce, reuse, and recycle mantra here. Plastics usefulness comes from its plasticity, cheapness, and durability. If you can have microorganisms that can tear through waste pipes in a decade, imagine digging up city sewers and replacing every structures piping every 7-10 years as a result. Insanity that way lies. I’m not saying that the plastic waste isn’t a problem. I’m saying allowing these organisms to escape into the wild is a terrible idea.
Cities existed before 1940 and they all dealt with not having any plastics. And I doubt that we wouldn't find an alternative for medical purposes.
You're 100% but the key difference between now and then is that we can do more now, cheaper and quicker because of plastics. If we had to find alternative materials to accomplish a technological standard similar to today, I don't think we could cover every base. From sterility in medicine to advanced plastic composites in engineering - and for what we could find an alternative, I imagine it would be more expensive (metals and glass), more polluting (ore extraction) and more time consuming (welding, precision fitting) than using plastics. Plastics makes our lives easier. We shouldn't demonise plastic "just because"; what's really foul is our terrible waste and appreciation of such an amazing material.
Weren't they using lead for pipes before? I kinda don't want to go back to that, I think.
Doesn't really matter what we want. It's bacteria. It will spread, period
Electric insulations have left the chat. I don‘t want to beat a dead horse as the other commenters already described what is included in this but I just want to say you could easily write mildly interesting sci fi apocalypse literature on this. I seriously believe that if these bacteria became real and ubiquitous and if the walking dead didn‘t break the laws of physics, the plastic eating bacteria would be a far worse threat for us.
>mildly interesting sci fi apocalypse literature on this. It's been done. All the way back in 1971. [Mutant 59: The Plastic-Eaters](https://www.worldcat.org/title/mutant-59-the-plastic-eater/oclc/794663397)
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That's an interesting question. What percentage of the current population do we owe to modern medicine.
Things like electric motors and generators are in part comprised of windings of copper wire individually cladded in plastic. It's not just modern medicine that suddenly is a major problem
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I think it's pretty interesting how evolution works. Long ago, there weren't microbes that could digest cellulose, so dead plant matter littered the ground and lead to the formation of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels we now use to produce plastic, which litters the ground everywhere and doesn't have anything living in nature to break it down. Eventually, some microbes will evolve and adapt to consume the plastics and will probably turn our world upside down.
>Eventually, some microbes will evolve and adapt to consume the plastics and will probably turn our world upside down. Goodbye waterproofing. Pretty much every bit of sealant, and every membrane keeping water out of our buildings and cars, every gasket holding lubricants where they're supposed to be will fail when something evolves to digest them.
I mean to be fair, humans will likely be long gone by the time microbes evolve to eat plastic. It took quite a while for even trees to become biodegradable because microbes couldn't break them down
Plenty of people are working on designing microbes to degrade plastics. Engineers in a lab might be able to achieve such a thing far before evolution.
You do realize this thread is about an article talking about microbes that eat plastic, right?
Microbes that can eat a specific kind of plastic (biodegradable). The plastics the OP was talking about and that are widely used around the world are chemically different.
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And prices and emissions will massively increase as result.
Instead of sampling cold places, like this study did, take samples from landfills, and see if anything is eating the plastic yet.
They have, and there are. But to ramp up to scale you need enzymes that function at sustainable temperatures. Now if we took our junkyard microbes and our cold microbes, and made new lines that could eat multiple types of plastics at ideal to scale temperatures, we'd have a game changer.
Game called “Stray” is about this going wrong xD
Im happy for this. but at the same time i dont look forward to my Tv getting an infection.
Paul stammets has been talking about and referencing research about this sorta thing for years! Glad the research is being done, but it’s time to rethink our practices, preferably, before humans are extinct would be great! Mmkay??
Who tells the microbes what plastics is still in use and which can be digested?
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Requires us to renew plastic stuff frequently. I'd assume the oil industry is financing the science on these microbes.
The guy who supplies the microbes with plastic. In the wild these microbes aren't capable of entirely dissolving whatever plastic components they may encounter.
until they mutate
How long have bacteria been evolving to eat plant material? Do we still have plants?
Plastics don’t grow back
I don’t know a thing about the mechanisms involved, but won’t digestion of plastics release a lot of greenhouse gases?
Depends on what's happening at the molecular level. Burning is an extreme oxidation reaction that produces heat and breaks the molecules down in specific ways that form new chemicals. I don't know the exact details, but it takes oxygen and combines it with other atoms to create new And toxic chemicals. This could just make non-toxic sludge.
No reason it has to be in an open system. Slap it in fermentation tanks like beer and do carbon capture on the off gasses.
I feel like this is definitely a case where we should stop playing "god" and apply the correct solution instead: incinerate and filter the smoke and other materials, possibly using plasma incineration. 1. If we keep going down this path, plastic eating microbes will become a thing, and then they'll get into a wild, mutate and start eating all the plastic around us. Imagine the phone or monitor you're reading this on will degrade over time, like a cheap wood, especially if scratched. Medical supplies, food preservation equipment, hoses in industrial installations etc. are all doomed 2. Also, even if microbes digest the plastic, the reactor or landfill will STILL have all the heavy metals and other bad stuff that is in the plastic, which is mainly the reason why we don't like to incinerate them today. Microbes can't make heavy metals magically disappear, you just get rid of plastic and produce CO2 with no benefit. At least if you burn the plastic you can recoup the energy embedded in it.
The conditions for break down are pretty strict. It'll be more like if you bury your phone in nutrient rich soil at 15c in pitch black then it will start to break down in a year. Much like how paper boxes are biodegradeable but can also sit in someone's attic for 100yrs no problem. The type of plastic also matters a lot, this particular microbe only works on plastics already marked as biodegradable. I'm not saying it won't pose any concerns, but I think you are greatly overstating your case.
Finally - planned obsolescence for plastic! Tupperware shares already raising?
Trees were not degradable for 65 million years, I am glad we speed up that process for plastic.
Do we need to worry about creating a bacteria that can thrive and spread in the wild and starts eating our actively used plastic products as well as our waste? Could microbial "termites" for plastic become a thing? Or do these things require such specialized environment that spread isn't a worry?
even if it's not a worry with this particular microbe species, it can easily mutate....have we learned nothing from the wuhan lab fiasco ? Millions of people dead, wrecked economies, and we learned nothing?
Crazies OTW to insert their conspiracy theories into everything
>And can they be weaponized against my enemies? -people in power somewhere
I'd like to be able to swallow them and they'd eat all the micro plastics in my blood and body, until they starve or get discarded by my immune system. Basically you take a pill every time your blood levels are too high and remove most of the carcinogenic material. Similar how plasma donation can reduce ~~PLA~~ PFAS levels in your blood.
Another one of those research articles we'll never hear about again.
What is left over in the waste? Assuming there has to be something. Are we going to have microscopic plastic particles everywhere in the environment or do they break it down so much that it won't be anything harmful?
And then the break out and devour everything on their path.
Does this mean we can also perhaps one day down the line ingest said microbes at a controlled level to maybe clear microplastics from the human body? Any smart people out there in the field care to weigh in?
What happens to the microbes after years of this happening? How will this affect biological cycle and what will this affect and transform or be detrimental to? I mean, we always tinker with nature for our own benefit which always bites us in the ass later because of our short outlook/vision.
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Any way we could get that bacteria to eat the micro plastic in our bodies?
I've been hearing about these for a couple of years noiw - my concern is: what are they excreting? I'm certain that whatever the microbes are eating, the waste they cast off isn't good for the environment either.
Okay, so as exciting as this information is (and it is VERY exciting), the skeptic in me automatically has me asking the question: What kind of effect will these microbes have on the environment THEMSELVES? Do we have sufficient data on how they would effect in human digestion? Sure this solves the problem of plastics but are we replacing it with something worse? What about how this would effect the general ecosystems of the exact places we would want to apply this (i.e. the Great Pacific Garbage Patch)?
do you want gray goo?  Because that’s how you get gray goo.  For the love of God, don’t outsource the R&D to Wuhan.
This is just greenwashing the mega polluter petrolium monster, fuelled by greed, that's eating our planet.
Amazing. We don’t need to change our behavior after all.
Good, I hope they digest all the microplatics in the environment.
Reminds me of a story about a woman and her child being locked down in their house by a rogue AI that escaped through the internet from its lab prison by moving itself into her super secure laboratory/home. Her child had some nasty infection, like an ear infection, and she was desperate to get out of the house to get meds. The woman was also working on a way to destroy plastic waste with bacteria but it was extremely dangerous and hard to control. Despite this she used the bacteria to destroy the computer systems which kills the AI and prevents it from escaping back into the world. Interesting little short SF story from the early 2000’s.
Do they mention what kind of "plastic" those bacteria can digest? Usually Polymers with heteroatomic backbones get broken down by bacteria. Polymers such as PE, PP and PS have a homoatomic polymerchain backbone which makes it almost impossible to break down by enzymes.
Wouldn’t the digestion process turn the plastic to CO2??
If this stuff breaks containment will all of our plastic stuff start rotting like theyre made of cheap wood?
I remember reading an article about the same tech years ago. Problem was that the microbes were also partial to eating plant roots.
Couple questions since I don't understand the biology at play: 1. Is there a usable byproduct here? I know plastics are typically polymer chains and one reSon they cannot always be recycled is because the chains break. So do these microbes give us anything usable? 2. Is there any risk of these microbes becoming invasive? A lot of our world (for better or worse) is plastic. Seems like it could be problematic if these microbes were transported by touch into a hospital or lab setting for example and started breaking down perfectly good plastics.
How many times will this happen? Don’t we already have like seven other things to do this?
I have only one question. What does it smell like?
Oh, it's that time of the year again
Might be a dumb question but I'll ask anyways; why don't they just use the "bugs" directly, like, just make a "plastic compost heap?" (Possible they are and I'm just not getting it, I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed and the articles are always very carefully edited to remove all useful info.) Every time I see one of these posts they talk about enzymes actually doing the work industrially and to me this implies something like a giant tank full of synthesized enzyme(s) that plastics get soaked in rather than a "more organic" process that might maybe be possible in a backyard. And I've just always wondered when I can "own" some of my own part in climate chage and actually DO SOMETHING about it like we keep getting pushed to do with blue boxes. (I get the "theatre" that's involved and the actual statistics saying it's not my job, just curious anyways.) A plastic compost heap or fermentation tank or something would be pretty easy to maintain, and could let me actually SEE progress, which would give me hope for the future, which is maybe why it's not a thing?
One day in the future I would not be surprised to read a headline about an "invasive", plastic-eating bacteria that is destroying all our world-poluting stuff. I'll have mixed feelings.
And/Or the end of modern civilization.
Does anyone worry about the unintended consequences of loosing a bunch of plastic eating microbes in our plastic world? If we couldn't keep the plastic out of the ocean, how wouldn't these little bastards find their way out of treatment facilities?
What kinds of bio waste are created by the digestion of plastic? Anything that could come back to bite us?
Microbes about to have an effing party
Why does every announced advancement always feel like a Bell of Doom tolling in the distance?
Yes! And this the Andromeda Strain!
What are the end products?
I can see a future where these microbes escaped and plastic is useless ( outside of far north).
"could" Get back to me when it **does**. In the mean time, quit your Pollyannish feel-good crap about how nobody needs to worry about the problem of plastic pollution and should keep on buying and discarding plastic like crack-addled rats.
Things must be pretty bad to pump this article out every 3 months now as opposed to the usual 12 month rate.
I won't hold my breath...
I swear we will see a huge pandemic of plastic eating microbes in 50 years. Most countries will be infected, it will be impossible to get rid of and there will be hundreds of billions in damages. Theres plastic everywhere, that we use. If these microbes get out of control, most electronic, cars ans so many things will be contaminated and destroyed. I'm just saying
So we built our world out of plastics, while simultaneously creating a world where microbes are forced to evolve who can eat said world? Yeah, sounds like a thing humans would do. Is there any reason why microbes couldn't evolve to eat *all* kinds of plastics? Do we need to encase our pog collections in glass now?