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Bacteria Eat Styrofoam
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wed Mar 08, 2006 11:46 AM
from the just-like-a-tasty-steak dept.
from the just-like-a-tasty-steak dept.
chaosmage42 writes "Scientists at the University of Dublin have found a way to break down styrofoam, the bane of recyclers/composters everywhere. This could be a great step towards sustainability, but it does require the styrofoam to be heated first."
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Side Effect (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Side Effect (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Side Effect (Score:5, Funny)
Ah, the circle of life...
Parent
Re:Side Effect (Score:4, Funny)
Followed in short order by snakes to eat the mice, and apes to kill the snakes. Problem solved!
Parent
Re:Side Effect (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Side Effect (Score:5, Funny)
Then we would just need bacteria that eat each successive product until something useful comes out.
1. Bacteria turn styrefome into lead.
2. Bacteria turn lead into copper.
3. Bacteria turn copper into Guiness.
4. Profit!!!
Parent
Re:Side Effect (Score:5, Funny)
Step 5: Sell American beer
Step 6: Profit!
Yea, I know, the Europeans get a free ride off the Americans.. again.
Parent
Cancer anyone? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Cancer anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, styrene isn't especially toxic- the quoted toxicity data applies almost word for word for many organic liquids- gasoline (petrol), for instance. This process of breaking down polystyrene foam isn't exactly something you can safely do at home. Then again, you probably don't recycle polyethylene or aluminum at your residence either. There are safety and economies of scale issues with recycling those as well. However, it may find application on an industrial waste management scale. Done under controlled conditions, this process should certainly be no more hazardous than any other industrial process- and less hazardous than something like petroleum refining.
Parent
Re:Cancer anyone? (Score:3, Informative)
I would be more worried if you said:
"Last I checked, eating styrofoam let off some pretty nasty gasses..."
Re:Cancer anyone? (Score:3, Interesting)
You're referring, I hope, to the belief that the 'Cookbook' is a partly bogus text and that it was put out there as a tracer to mark suppressable malcontents. Low hanging fruit, in a sense.
I hope you aren't intimidated to the point where you wouldn't even discuss subversive motivations and techniques, whether you intend to use them or not. Working toward
In related news... (Score:3, Funny)
Anyway, the scientists fed this styrene oil to the soil bacteria Pseudomonas putida, which converted it into biodegradable plastic known as PHA (polyhydroxyalkanoates).
The next step for University College Dublin researchers is to get the bacteria to excrete Guinness.
Re:In related news... (Score:4, Funny)
Brilliant!
Parent
Re:In related news... (Score:4, Funny)
A proper haiku
Also mentions the weather
or the seasons, dude.
Parent
Re:In related news... (Score:2)
Development plan:
Step 1: Get Dublin researchers to excrete Guiness. Accomplished!
Step 2: Who gives a crap?!
Re:In related news... (Score:4, Funny)
Preliminary tests have already met with success in getting UCD researchers to excrete Molson Export, Labbat's Blue and three varieties of Budweiser.
Parent
Re:In related news... (Score:3, Informative)
I bartended all throughout college and on and off for a little while after while I built up my resume. You wouldn't believe how many Irish and German patrons I had that couldn't get enough of the stuff. It was amazing.
You got to remember, our Imports are their domestic and vice versa.
Another method.... (Score:5, Funny)
Just disolve the styrofoam with gasoline and tada, you have napalm. Bingo bango, problem solved!
As one learns too late (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Another method.... (Score:2)
Napalm (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
How long do plastic bags and bottles last anyway? (Score:2)
The problem is really apparent if you travel through India or another less developed country. They have no social stigma against littering like we do in western countries.
Plastic bags and water bottles are everywhere throughout the landscape, I've seen mountain villages use otherwise pristine streams as dumping grounds for vast mounds of plastic.
Will these things ever
I've seen this in action. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I've seen this in action. (Score:3, Insightful)
Later,
-Slashdot Junky
Re:I've seen this in action. (Score:5, Funny)
My last experiment with aquatic ecosystems ended rather badly, unfortunately. I was raising a sea monkey colony. One night, I was enjoying a few beers, and I suddenly decided I had to know whether sea monkeys also liked beer. Science in action!
Alas, sea monkeys do *not* like beer. I'm not sure if it's the various carbohydrates, yeasts and soforth that so disagreed with them, or if they just can't hold their liquor.
Parent
Re:I've seen this in action. (Score:5, Informative)
Nice try though.
Parent
Re:I've seen this in action. (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:I've seen this in action. (Score:4, Insightful)
so really, 'biodegradable' is just a catch phrase, anything that is esposed to sun wind and rain long enough will break down. although it may not be 'safe' to allow such things to break down that way, as polystryne beads might choke innocent creatures trying to eat them, etc.
however, building nearly self contained ecosystems to break town waste would create more of a problem, than processing them, or simply burying them already does.
Parent
Re:I've seen this in action. (Score:4, Insightful)
Not a very good analogy. Even though the polystyrene is only eroded to microparticles, it isn't actually poisonous.
True, but the point of the GP post wasn't that the polystyrene wasn't poisonous, but rather that he thought that it was "gone" simply because he couldn't see it anymore, and for that point the analogy still stands.
The general public's understanding and 'lay' usage of the word "biodegradability" may be a 'red herring', but the actual notion is important in studies of industrial chemicals and so on (e.g. cf http://www.steve.gb.com/me/work.html [gb.com]). Whether something can be eaten by bacteria (and broken down in this way) is actually pretty important, in fact it is one of the primary ways in which dangerous molecules are broken down in the environment into non-dangerous molecules. You make it sound like nobody worries about this sort of thing ever, which isn't true, there are plenty of once-common chemicals that have now been banned because they were toxic and found to persist in the environment (and more in the pipeline e.g. PBDEs) - the very reason we don't have to fear modern landfills so much is precisely because there is now a lot more 'control' over what is used or discarded in manufacturing and so the things we buy these days are a lot more "harmless". This isn't because biodegradability isn't a concern, it's precisely because it has been a very real concern.
As for 100 year old newspapers being readable on a landfill, I'm rather skeptical of that claim, given that having "studied" my own garbage I've found that anything paper rots away within mere weeks. It's practically impossible to stop the stuff from rotting unless it's sealed, and there will always be humidity in the heap because a large portion of stuff on the landfill is 'wet' in nature (e.g. bits of rotting fruit peels) so you can't keep anything paper dry.
Parent
I hope it takes *something* (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope so. It would be rather bad if there was a bacteria that could feed on styrofoam that hadn't been altered in some way. Order some electronics online, and they arrive in a box dripping with whatever organic waste products these bacteria leave behind... Yeah, I'm glad.
Cost/benefit? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm glad this type of research is ongoing. We really need to help old lady Earth out as much as possible these days.
Re:Cost/benefit? (Score:5, Interesting)
All the tech on RingWorld stopped working because some traveling ship showed up carrying a bacteria that ate superconductors.
Floating cities crashed, people starved, basically everything went to hell and all the people reverted to tribal/nomadic existence.
Admittedly, the bacteria came from outside the 'system' but there's a larger meaning in that story.
Parent
Re:Cost/benefit? (Score:3, Informative)
(*** minor spoiler if you haven't read beyond the first book ***)
The bacteria were deliberately introduced into the Ringworld environment with that specific intention, so it wasn't an unintended side-effect.
Cost v. Benefit? (Score:5, Interesting)
The foam doesn't just need to be warmed, it has to be heated to the point of breaking down. I can't imagine doing this on a large scale would be cheap. Would the enviromental impact resulting from the creation of millions of joules of energy required to break down styrofoam outweigh the environmental benefits of destroying the styrofoam?
Also, I have learned from my accidental non-scientific microwave experiments that melting styrofoam smells terrible. Would liquifying styrofoam on a large scale produce similar noxious fumes (and potential environmental side effects)?
Re:Cost v. Benefit? (Score:4, Interesting)
Recycling requires energy, yes. The benefit for recycling has never been that it takes less energy to form/manufacture , but that it is cheaper to buy X tonnes of used material versus digging/farming/buying X tonnes of new material.
If you're worried about heating, I wouldn't be. Heat can be generated via electricity, which can be generated via clean methods.
Parent
Private enviro-bacterial research organization? (Score:4, Interesting)
We had talked about the problem with pollution and his solution was always using government to try to make people stop polluting. Yet it seems to me that there are other solutions, including finding ways to take pollutants and break them down. I've heard more and more over the recent years about using bacteria to break down oil spills and radioactive wastes and even to use bacteria to eat up garbage dumbs. Here is another article regarding new bacteria that serve the purpose of cleaning up past pollutions.
I know from my experiences that government regulations on polluting seem to have a positive effect of making the world cleaner, but they also have a negative effect of reducing a company's ability to provide their customers with a product or service at the best price. Sure, the average socialist will say that corporations just want to pollute the world so they can make a buck, but that's not the case: corporations want to provide the best price to their consumers, which is why pollution has tended to be so obvious. It also seems to me that there are new and amazing ways to fix the problem of pollution without only making the source stop.
Are there organizations, private ones, that are dedicated to finding new ways to combat the pollutants around us? If so, I'd love to know how I can help fund them. I'm a regular reader of perc.org which focuses on private and voluntary environmentalism, and I'd love to put my money where my mouth is.
Amazonian beetle larvae eat plastic (Score:3, Interesting)
bacteria.. (Score:5, Funny)
Not With a Bang or a Whimper, But a Burp (Score:5, Interesting)
What happens when these bacteria inevitably escape into the "wild"? Powerplants and conduits, whose designers never anticipated that hot styrofoam would rot within a few weeks, could suddenly fail, causing disasters worldwide. Nuclear plants, including nuclear submaries and aircraft carriers, could literally explode once their insulation (both heat and electric charge) disappears. Less sensational, but probably more destructive overall, bacterial infestations of general consumer products would destroy vast amounts of property with styrofoam components. Much of it critical, some of it valuable, but all of it gone, likely in large quantities.
The bacteria engineers would be much more responsible to include a critical factor required by the bacteria for digesting styrofoam, other than just heat. Like a cheap, biodegradable, nontoxic fluid "tagged" with a specific set of functional groups. That "synthetic enzyme" would allow the bacteria to eat the styrofoam when applied. When not applied, the bacteria couldn't eat, couldn't reproduce. We could control the amount of styrofoam consumed by controlling the cheap enzyme, mixing it into landfills and water purification.
This actually scares me (Score:5, Interesting)
Imagine if your laptop computer started growing mold like an old loaf of bread. Now take a look around your house, office, or wherever and imagine if every single plastic item in existence did. Maybe it won't ever happen -- I certainly hope not -- but this is a worrying first step. Are we too confident in the permanence of our plastic items?
Re:This actually scares me (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably something similar to what would happen if bacteria, mold, insects, et. al. suddenly started being able to eat wood!! Look around at all the things that are made of wood or use wood in their construction. Civilization would surely fall if that were to ever happen. Maybe if we're really lucky it will never happen. Or maybe, just maybe, we'd learn to deal with it.
Parent
Re:This actually scares me (Score:3, Insightful)
Given that wood, cloth, and leather are already biodegradable, I'm not so worried.
Heated how much? (Score:3, Interesting)
Composting produces quite a bit of heat, if it requires to be heated to those temperatures, it could be included in a process (bury it in compostable material, let the heat build up, etc).
Else, you could use solar energy. Our backyard composters are black plastic, they're frigid now, but in the summer sun they get so hot you can barely touch 'em... then again, TFA seems to imply "heated to liquefaction", so, maybe not.
Cool science! But there's no landfill problem (Score:5, Interesting)
But on a public policy side, there's no landfill shortage at all.
Check out this article from the New York Times magazine, "Recycling is Garbage" by John Tierney. From the article:
A. Clark Wiseman, an economist at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash., has calculated that if Americans keep generating garbage at current rates for 1,000 years, and if all their garbage is put in a landfill 100 yards deep, by the year 3000 this national garbage heap will fill a square piece of land 35 miles on each side.
This doesn't seem a huge imposition in a country the size of America. The garbage would occupy only 5 percent of the area needed for the national array of solar panels proposed by environmentalists. The millennial landfill would fit on one-tenth of 1 percent of the range land now available for grazing in the continental United States. And if it still pains you to think of depriving posterity of that 35-mile square, remember that the loss will be only temporary. Eventually, like previous landfills, the mounds of trash will be covered with grass and become a minuscule addition to the nation's 150,000 square miles of parkland.
It appears someone archived it here.... http://www.williams.edu/HistSci/curriculum/101/gar bage.html [williams.edu]
And there's the actual nytimes page... http://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/30/magazine/063096- tierney-magazine.html [nytimes.com]
(If you get to this link from John Tierney's nytimes columnist page, they give you this article for free, but if you follow any other link, they try to charge you. weird!)
We use a product called "Meltdown" (Score:4, Interesting)
http://visualpollution.com/Construction/meltdown.
Essentially you spray this stuff on the foam, it smells a bit like oranges. Within seconds, it "dissolves" the foam, and can actually be used over again, so what we do is spray the foam, then put it in a bucket and keep feeding pieces into the bucket. It makes a sticky "slime". I'm honestly not sure what we do with the substance once we're done, but I think that we just keep using it in the bucket, it keeps eating foam. I imagine that at some point it reaches some sort of "equilibrium" where it doesn't dissolve any more. The MSDS http://visualpollution.com/PDF/Meltdown.pdf/ [visualpollution.com] says it is accepted by most sewage plants.
I suppose the advantage of the article's subject is that it actually turns the foam into something usable, rather than just d-Limonene sludge.
Re:We use a product called "Meltdown" (Score:3, Informative)
So does my wife. (Score:5, Funny)
This isn't Styrofoam!!! (Score:3, Funny)
styrofoam - explosives (Score:4, Interesting)
'course these days that's probably not a wise area to be researching.
While I'm on the subject of getting hydrophobic and hydrophilic things together:
Know why white bears dissolve in water?
Coz they're polar!
Re:So what about me? (Score:4, Funny)
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