How many people today grab a takeaway coffee cup from the local cafe to drink on the go? We don’t know, but the number must be enormous.. Most every one of the above have a plastic top that will last 100s of years. Some cafes still use plastic cups that last a similar time. Is 10 minutes of coffee worth 100s of years of trash?
These items can be seen littering our gutters and on our streets all over the place. If they were all cardboard, they would still be littered, but they would, at least, be gone in a short time.
They do not need to be made of plastic.
On the way home from the gym last week, a distance of about 1 km (1/2 mile), I counted the items of plastic litter on the curb as I walked. In that short distance I counted 63 pieces of plastic litter. Plastic drink bottles, bottle tops, candy wrappers, plastic film, polystyrene fragments etc. That seemed to be a lot to me. I guess it is a generational thing. Our parents would have been horrified to see that amount, whereas it seems to go unnoticed by our youth of today. In another 20 years how many pieces will there be on this stretch, -- 200? What will today’s youth think of that new amount then when they are older? Will their children be so readily accepting of a higher amount of litter? Microbes discovered that can digest plastics at low temperatures
Posted on May 15, 2023 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste NewsScientists from the Swiss Federal Institute WSL have found microbes that can do this at 15C, which could lead to a breakthrough in microbial recycling. Their findings have been published in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology.
Dr Joel Rüthi from WSL 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. They let the microbes grow as single-strain cultures in the laboratory in darkness at 15C and tested them to see if they could digest different types of plastic.
The plastics tested included non-biodegradable polyethylene (PE) and the biodegradable polyester-polyurethane (PUR) as well as two commercially available biodegradable mixtures of polybutylene adipate terephthalate (PBAT) and polylactic acid (PLA).
None of the strains were able to digest PE, even after 126 days of incubation on these plastics. But 19 strains (56%), including 11 fungi and eight bacteria, were able to digest PUR at 15C, while 14 fungi and three bacteria were able to digest the plastic mixtures of PBAT and PLA.
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