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Bacteria Eat Styrofoam
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."
Unfortunately, eating the styrofoam causes the bacteria to shit lead. Give a penny, take a penny.
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Last I checked, heating styrofoam let off some pretty nasty gasses... Is this really the whiz-bang solution we were hoping for?
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.-TJ
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.
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Just disolve the styrofoam with gasoline and tada, you have napalm. Bingo bango, problem solved!
This could be a great step towards sustainability, but it does require the styrofoam to be heated first.
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.
The enemies of Democracy are
I'd like to see a comprehensive cost/benefit analysis in a real-world application. On the one hand, ridding ourselves of zillions of cubic yards of polystyrene materials (yes, Styrofoam is a trademarked name). On the other hand, releasing a bacteria through animal (?) husbandry may have repercussions about which we have not thought. I'd be very interested to see an analysis of whether or not these particular bacteria can have detrimental excretions, or even have an issue with the bacteria mutating into an "undesireable" breed.
I'm glad this type of research is ongoing. We really need to help old lady Earth out as much as possible these days.
A Passionate Independent Musician
From reading the article (I know, how novel!), I understand that the styrofoam must be turned into a liquid and the first thing that came to my mind was: How much energy is required to do that?
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)?
I had a good debate with a ('socialist') friend yesterday regarding funding research and development voluntarily -- medical, environmental, etc.
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.
now if they could only fart ozone..
That's awesome! You've got a wife that doesn't make you throw stuff like that out!
Later,
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Landfill Mining Co.
Managing the (Un)natural Resources of Tomorrow
perhaps, but definitely not the first post by organisms with the same intelligence level as bacteria.
sudo killall humans
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.
Larry Niven's famous Ringworld civilization (SPOILER ALERT) collapsed when they became infested with rampant superconductor-eating bacteria.
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.
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make install -not war
Nice try though.
This actually scares me. What happens to modern society when bacteria, fungus, and other assorted critters evolve the ability to break down plastics? There is no particular reason this can't happen, as plastics would make an extremely high-energy organic food source.
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?
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
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
And there's the actual nytimes page... http://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/30/magazine/063096- tierney-magazine.html
(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!)
Did you check the water for dissolved polystyrene? Solubility for polystyrene is very low, but it may be noticeable after 10 years. If it did dissolve and not degrade, that means that all the styrofoam is chemically unchanged and is still in the 5-gallon bottle.
We use a lot of EPS and styrofoam where I work (theatre, we make a lot of scenery with it), and we use a product called "Meltdown".
h tm/.
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/ 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.
I was going to say that too... but then you have to get rid of the napalm somehow. But then it's not a waste problem anymore. It's a military problem!
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She calls them "rice cakes", though.
Styrofoam (R) is a Trademark of The Dow Chemical COmpany. What this article is talking about is normal polystyrene such as taht used in cups.
If one wants to do something useful with all the excess styrofoam, consider that it is basically a long-chain alkane with phenyl group side chains, each of which individually look a lot like toluene. Looking at it from the phenyl group's point of view, it's an aromatic ring with a big anonymous alkane hanging off it, which will act perfectly well as an activating, ortho-para directing side chain. Add some nitric and sulfuric acid and you've made poly-TNT. The only reason this is more difficult than the standard stepwise nitration of toluene is that it's hard to find a solvent that dissolves polystyrene but is also fully miscible with the nitric/sulfuric, but there ARE solutions (pardon the pun) to the problem.
'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!
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Well I'd just like to point out a few points 1. Everything is either biodegradable, or erodable. 'non biodegradable plastic' is a con, it's plastic that takes Decades of exposure to sunlight, hot and cold temperatures to erode/degrade away. the thing is, landfills have NONE of that, they have one nice constant temperature, one nice constant level of humidity, and no sunlight of anykind. Plastatcs that can 'degrade' under the conditions found in a landfill can be made, mainly by examining the prevlent soil bacteria, and making the polymers an 'ideal' treat for said soil bacteria. normal houshold goods like 'apple cores' are non 'biodegradable' in that, once burried they become 'petrafied' and fosilized. (after enough time has passed)
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.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
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). 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.