Why is plastic pollution a problem?
Plastic doesn’t rot and mix with the soil like other natural materials or get reused like metal. So, plastic has nowhere to go once it’s thrown away.
Many times, it ends up in water bodies like oceans, seas, and lakes. Here, it ends up killing sea animals who eat the plastic thinking that it’s food. All these pieces of plastic harm the environment and cause plastic pollution.
What are plastic-eating bacteria?
Plastic forms 12 percent of all garbage produced in the world. It is made up of very small material called molecules. These molecules are chained together to give shape to the plastic. In 2016, Japanese researchers discovered a special type of bacteria eating the chains of plastic molecules and named it ‘Ideonella sakaiensis 201-F6.
What’s so special about the Ideonella sakaiensis?
The Ideonella sakaiensis is the first bacteria discovered that loves to munch on the molecule chains of artificial material like plastic. The problem is that the Ideonella sakaiensis takes years to eat very small amounts of plastic molecules.
To get them to eat faster, the researchers at the University of Texas Austin (UTAUS) took some help from artificial intelligence (AI).
AI and plastic-eating bacteria…Are we talking about a sci-fi movie here?
Nope, not at all. The AI helped researchers figure out which chains of plastic the Ideonella sakaiensis can eat so that the plastic can be gobbled up faster. Now the bacteria take 8 days, instead of years, to eat it.
Is the plastic-eating bacteria the solution to the plastic problem?
The bacteria are eating the chains of the plastic, not the actual plastic. After it’s done eating, there is a small puddle of sludge that gets left behind.
The good part about this is that creating new plastic from the sludge is way better for the environment than creating fresh plastic. Let’s hope our scientists figure out a more permanent solution to the world’s plastic problem.
