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TIL - Laboratory experiments show that bacteria really do eat and digest plastic
(www.sciencedaily.com)
This is the best summary I could come up with:
When she fed that plastic to bacteria after pretreatment with "sunlight" -- a UV lamp -- in a bottle of simulated seawater, she saw that special version of carbon appear as CO2 above the water.
"The treatment with UV light was necessary because we already know that sunlight partially breaks down plastic into bite-sized chunks for bacteria," the researcher explains.
Even though marine microbiologist Goudriaan is very excited about the plastic-eating bacteria, she stresses that microbial digestion is not a solution to the huge problem of all the plastic floating on and in our oceans.
Recently Goudriaan's colleague Annalisa Delre published a paper about sun light which breaks down plastics on the ocean's surfaces.
In the latest issue of Marine Pollution Bulletin, PhD student Annalisa Delre and colleagues calculate that about two percent of visibly floating plastic may disappear from the ocean surface in this way each year.
Our data show that sunlight could thus have degraded a substantial amount of all the floating plastic that has been littered into the oceans since the 1950s," says Delre.
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