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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
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.
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Brilliant!
--- As to make my comment seem, by comparison, more intelegent... doodie doodie doodie poop poop poop!
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)?
now if they could only fart ozone..
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.
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o0t!
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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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?
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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.