Scissors cut paper. Paper wraps rock. Lab-made enzyme eats plastic A new enzyme developed at the University of Portsmouth will enable the recycling of plastic used for disposable drinks containers. A commercial infrastructure based around the enzyme would have two benefits: disposing of the original container, and creating new clear plastic for reuse. Professor John McGeehan said the …
Some scientists can read, some can write, some can do both of those, some can even do numbers and logic and other fact-based stuff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kit_Pedler
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0670035/
And, as many others have noted, Mutant 59 was directly or indirectly based on Doomwatch, S1 Ep1: The Plastic Easters.
The Daily Mail and its anti-science friends are only a few decades late catching on to this plastic dependence. Maybe they're finally learning to read. It'd be a start.
George RR Martin in the 90s did a TV movie pilot for a series called Doorways where the protagonists could jump through a portal into an alternative dimension where things were the same but slightly different. This preceded Sliders by about a year (wonder where they got the idea). Anyway one of the plot lines of the dimension they jumped into was that on earth 2 (or was it 3, I haven’t seen it since 1994) they had designed a bug that would solve the earths ecological problems by eating oil based waste. Only the bug spread worldwide eating all the oil, and anything made from it such as plastics. As a result the earth was a much healthier place to live due to no pollution, but we were pretty much living back in the 1800s technologically.
From an isolated engineered enzyme? feck all. Enzymes do not replicate on their own.
We have an increasing history of using tame, domesticated bugs to create enzymes which cannot escape the lab/factory. In Biolabs we use E. coli bacteria on the open lab bench containing all manner of genes. They are heavily crippled, they need a critical amino acid not common in the environment as their ability to make it was removed, they cannot have sex with other bacteria so cannot get it back from the environment and various other technical cripplings. If you go onto one of the biotech company sites selling those bacteria tweaked so they are ready to have dna put into them then all the cripplings are listed.
So, to make this enzymes we can just plug it into a domestic strain, perhaps one of those churning out clothes washing enzymes and which have been doing so for decades without escaping.
Yours Muscleguy BSc, Phd.
I assume any bacteria made to produce the enzymes have a risk of escaping, possibly even the gene migrating to other bacteria... but at the same time there is a risk they loose the ability naturally.
Mainly natural things don't run away catastrophically too often... but with out help things can get out of hand locally.
Note however this is an enzyme, not a bacteria.
It does not self replicate
The trouble starts if someone reverse engineers it back into a bacteria and that escapes into the wild.
Doesn't anyone think it impressive they found the prototype of this enzyme already in the wild?
Evolution in action.
Well yes. Its funny how often people forget that crude oil is a natural product so of course there are bacteria that eat it: there are bacteria that will have a go at practically anything.
But for all the doom doom about it escaping, we have a world full of bacteria, fungi, insects and goodness knows what else that happily eat wood, and we manage to live with it quite happily.
Incidentally I am very unsure about this "Plastic lasts thousands of years" stuff. I'm 30 plus years out of date now, but when I was briefly in the industry the problem that was always exercising us was stopping the stuff breaking down ion its own.
Read about this yesterday and it sounds amazing, hopefully they can produce it enough quantity to make it a viable solution.
Although, I am reminded of the fact that in Niven's Ringworld novels it's revealed that the Ringworld creator's civilisation failed because of an errant bacteria being accidentally introduced that ate all of their superconductors. There'd need to be some fairly tight controls around using this to avoid it getting out into the "wild".
Yep, the scariest word in that article is "accidentally". What else are they accidentally creating and what are the odds it might not be controllable... Lots of sci-fi references on similar stories but I like Michael Critchon's "The Andromeda Strain" in which an alien bacterium is brought back to earth and mutates rapidly. At one stage it likes dissolving rubber...
> ... Ringworld creator's civilisation failed because of an errant bacteria being accidentally introduced that ate all of their superconductors.
As I recollect, it was not accidental - it was a deliberate act by a (different) alien civilisation.
Which somehow makes all this talk about enzymes and the (presumed) bacteria that produce them slightly more scary.
and once they've eaten all the plastic, and having gone through (unexpectedly, but of course) blitz adaptation to consume metal, "scientists have discovered, to their concern, that a new strain of bacteria has developed, which is capable of disassembling human body and turning it into compost in less than 2 milis
;)
"and having gone through (unexpectedly, but of course) blitz adaptation to consume metal, "
Good luck with that.
I know you're joking, but you can't "consume" metals very easily. Completely different metabolic pathway needed, and the bacteria would need to arise quite independently. With all the steel structures we have around the place, you'd have thought if it was easy bacteria would be chewing them up by now.
Concrete however...thiobacter concretivorans lives in hot springs and uses limestone as a substrate. The pools of nuclear reactors turned out to be a similar environment. But it does like warm conditions.
So they shouldn't alternately excrete perovskites, electroparamagnetic organics, graphene and nitrogen-doped carbon nanotubes? What's a successor microbe to do? Straight up turn terepthalate into photonic crystals that emulate gold or some fashionable late transition metal? WiMP-consuming hyperperiodic bosonic condensates that turn deep space into light daytime talk/comedy space?
ViM>You can't "consume" metals very easily.
Not until the spring-steel connective tissue patch really hits 9.0.
You don't want to sample compartment syndrome at 8.0. Ping!
This post has been deleted by its author
I think some readers may see that as inferring this is a problem of Chinese origin. It's not; their action has simply highlighted the scale of the issue.
Yes - that's exactly what I meant. Not blaming China - if blaming anyone, then blaming the UK for just paying to push the problem onto someone else.
"Yes - that's exactly what I meant. Not blaming China - if blaming anyone, then blaming the UK for just paying to push the problem onto someone else."
For that matter, does New York (other US coastal cities are available) still barge it's rubbish out to sea and dump it? If not, how recently did they stop?
For that matter, does New York (other US coastal cities are available) still barge it's rubbish out to sea and dump it? If not, how recently did they stop?
They definitely weren't dumping it in the ocean in 1987, otherwise NYC wouldn't have had the garbage barge incident:
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/trash-fight-long-voyage-new-york-unwanted-garbage-barge-article-1.812895
They definitely weren't dumping it in the ocean in 1987, otherwise NYC wouldn't have had the garbage barge incident:
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/trash-fight-long-voyage-new-york-unwanted-garbage-barge-article-1.812895
Thanks for that. That's probably the incident that got distorted in my hazy memory and made me think they were dumping it at sea.
I think some readers may see that as inferring this is a problem of Chinese origin
Ridiculous, the origin of it suddenly becoming more of a priority problem is that suddenly the problem can't be offloaded for someone else to deal with.
The SEP field broke down, and reality poked it's nose round the door, grinned smugly and presented a huge bill.
When I was a kid, I used to supplement pocket money looking for glass bottles that could be returned for a few pennys (I think penny chews were just moving into 2p range - so that'll give you an idea the date). Then plastic was more convenient, now we're talking about returning to to a similar solution (only with stick not carrot).
I can't decide, one step forward, two steps back or two steps forward, one step back.
I was at a music festival with my family. There were those plastic glasses being used and people (generally did recycle on site). However, we noticed children/teens collecting glasses from the field. The staff at the bar agreed to give free drinks via tokens (that could also be used on chips/pizza). The children turned it into an enterprise (although I did notice turf wars between different groups of children). However - the field was generally rubbish free. Child labour but the children were perfectly happy doing it, in return for free drinks and food.
I remember returning bottles for 2p too (back when a 10p mix up was a really big bag of sweets)
Single-use is design tragedy of sorts. Brutalism for nothingness fans. You either integrate the pipecleaner with the single-use straw or call it trash and imagine it thoroughly enough to pop out in a way that at least agonizes gulls if not performing as silage straw, doing turtle-gut cleansing that missing seaweeds no longer do, and making supercaustic in breakdown to combat carbonic acid.
I remember when beer was less than 1 shilling a pint.
More to the point, try keeping count of the bits of plastic you throw away each day - yoghurt pots, snack wrappers, bubble wrap and polystyrene popcorn packaging, toothpaste tubes etc,etc,etc - all carefully made, high spec materials made to be thrown away.
"Black Jacks and Fruit Salads were 1/2 p each when I was growing up."
Pah! Kids!. They were 4 for a penny when I was a kid (that's 1d not 1 new penny too!)
Technically, they cost a farthing each, but even I'm not quite old enough to remember actual farthings.
(and yes, for you youngsters, farthing as in the Penny Farthing Bicycle, so-called because a penny was a large coin and a farthing, a 1/4 penny, was very small)
H4rm0ny> I refuse to believe these tales of sweets that cost half a pence. Surely that would be below the minimum transaction free of your debit card.
Maybe, but I don't think we had debit cards before decimalisation. (The Barclaycard, credit card, arrived in 1966). Back then your statement was on a Hollerith card, which you returned with your cheque. Harvey Matusow discovered that, if you edited the Hollerith card, you could choose a new balance. I never tried this, but I had a friend who achieved the same end by purposely "maxing out" his Barclaycard on high end camera gear a few days before emigrating to Australia:)
I scuba dive and the amount of trash you see is unforgivable. I try to pick the stuff up and even take a net bag for that purpose on most dives but even though I am far from alone in doing this, it just seems to be a never ending, unwinnable battle and we need a proper solution rather than just shipping it around to make it someone else's problem.
25 odd years ago when I started to get involved with largescale replacement of PC's and printers and stuff I initially thought that sending them to Africa and the developing world was a fine solution and gave them a newlife. Didn't take long to find that they were thrown into containers so most of them arrived smashed and trashed, and ultimately, when they were scrapped, they were just dumped, or left for kids to break up. Back then, with CRT's and the like, there was little regulation on mercury, cadmium and other toxic stuff which was contained therein.
The only way to dispose of stuff created in the first world is to dispose of it in the first world. Whilst WEEE regulations can be a pain, making manufacturers have to think about the costs of disposal means they put some thought into the design process.
Single use plastics and the war on plastic bags may be an inconvenience for us all, but ultimately it is the right thing to do.
What was wrong with old fashioned paper bags anyway?
"What was wrong with old fashioned paper bags anyway?"
They fall apart when they get wet, hence the expression, "as weak as a damp paper bag".
If anything, paper bags were the problem, because they taught us to think of shopping bags as disposable, when we could be using harder wearing, re-usable plastic bags from the start (as we do now).
"f anything, paper bags were the problem, because they taught us to think of shopping bags as disposable, when we could be using harder wearing, re-usable plastic bags from the start (as we do now)."
Unfortunately the re-usable bags have a much larger carbon footprint than the 'single use' bags (about 150 times greater) while the 'single use' bags usually get re-purposed, thusavoiding the need for buying other plastic bags for the secondary purpose.
When one looks at the illness and mortality data associated with re-usable bags, one can make a very good public health argument for banning them.
"Unfortunately the re-usable bags have a much larger carbon footprint than the 'single use' bags (about 150 times greater) while the 'single use' bags usually get re-purposed, thusavoiding the need for buying other plastic bags for the secondary purpose."
You do raise an interesting point there, but I suppose it all boils down to individuals. I have almost no need to re-use single use carrier bags and the shopping bags we use are now coming up to 3 years old and still going strong. In my case, I'd say we already broke even on the carbon footprint and are now in debit.
Uh, when I was a child, my Mum used to get all her shopping in her shopping bag - which was generally made of a hard-wearing cord. If there was lots to get, she'd use a two-wheeled shopping trolley. Yes, stuff was often put into paper bags by the vendors, but those paper bags weren't generally intended to be what you carried them home in. IMO, plastic shopping bags were teh problem, as they offered a solution to those who found themselves wanting to purchase more than the pint of milk and loaf of bread they;d originally intended, and so had not bothered bringing their durable shopping bag along. Laziness did the rest. (And I've been as guilty as anyone else in that laziness in the past).
"a solution to those who found themselves wanting to purchase more than the pint of milk and loaf of bread they;d originally intended,"
And our local Morrisons (probably a chain wide decision) are no longer going to provide single use bags at all now. So those times I pop in for a one or two items and impulse buy more, do I just stop and not buy those items or do buy yet another multi-use bag at whatever price they are now charging? I suspect this might be a short lived decision if the bottom line is hit.
When ASDA started charging for carrier bags ( a couple of years before the law was changed ), I got to the counter, was told carrier bags are now 5p ( or whatever they were ).
I said sod that and left my shopping on the conveyer belt.
I'm guessing a lot of people did that because they stopped charging for bags.
Paper produced from hemp would be a better alternative. If it weren't illegal.
Why would paper made from hemp be illegal? Hemp is currently grown for use in the building construction industry (although there's some which doesn't make it that far, as people steal some of the crop in the mistaken belief that it still contains the chemical components which would make it a narcotic).
@ (although there's some which doesn't make it that far, as people steal some of the crop in the mistaken belief that it still contains the chemical components which would make it a narcotic).
Perhaps they steal it because the local hemp has more efficient roots and the marijuana can be spliced onto it for faster growth.
funny how the Americans never made the move from paper to plastic "grocery" bags , from what I can see in the movies.
But the paper bags only have to be carried out to the F150 in the parking lot.
It's not easy to carry paper sacks with no handles when you're walking
"...That's an unfair stereotype. The other half of drivers use the more elegant and tasteful SUV..."
We had an SUV when we went to Florida - needed 7 seas as there were 6 of us.
Big 6.2 litre engine that seemed to be giving decent returns in terms of MPG.
Until we realised that it had a monstrous 120l tank and was actually doing something like 12mpg.
Big, yes. Tasteful - for an SUV, maybe. Elegant? Not in the slightest.
funny how the Americans never made the move from paper to plastic "grocery" bags
Yep they did. In stores where someone is there to pack your bags they use far too many that are less than a third full, DOUBLE BAGGED!! I can never believe how many carrier bags I have after a small shop. When I visit US I actually take my own bags now!
"Why cant we we (and everyone else) do their own recycling?"
Because it is a complicated technical problem with different, incompatible implementations and a requirement for specialized knowledge and equipment for each different solution set, not to mention various serious safety issues.
"Why cant we we (and everyone else) do their own recycling?".
Britain is not too good at recycling whatever.
What is the country that recycles the most?
Leading the list with a whopping 52 percent of its waste being recycled is Switzerland. This is nearly double what the United States has. Number two on the list is Austria with 49.7 percent. This is a close match for number three-ranked Germany with 48 percent and number four-ranked Netherlands with 46 percent.
Japan's plastic waste utilization rate stood at 83% in 2014, up from 73% in 2006 and 39% in 1996, according to the nation's Plastic Waste Management Institute [35]. The figure for the UK is about half that of Japan's, while the figure for the US is around 20%.
As for Gove's deposit return scheme, many European countries have had it for many years now.
But I suppose island people have a temptation to just dump everything in the sea.
PS. I hope leaving the EU doesn't make you shit in the Thames again.
Reminds me of a French audience being unable to restrain themselves when I mentioned we had developed something for the then British telecoms company GPT. When pronounced in French it comes out as "jay pay tay" - j'ai pété or "I have farted".
This is why brand names are difficult.
Yep, I also believe it may have been one of the reasons Commodore changed the name of their original PET computer (which, they said, stood for Personal Electronic Transactor) to the CBM range. Later on they had to call the VIC-20 the VC-20 in Germany as VIC was apparently a swear word.
What are the end results of the breaking down by this wonder enzyme? (Sorry if this is obvious to some of you, I switched off when we did organic chemistry, not sure why)
I'm all for it if it is as good as suggested, but also wonder if the enzyme 'gets out' that plastics will no longer be useful for what we really liked them for - longevity, hygiene etc.
Having said all this, we humans probably just need to consume a heel of a lot less or just say "fuck the planet, let's party!!!!"
"What are the end results of the breaking down by this wonder enzyme? (Sorry if this is obvious to some of you, I switched off when we did organic chemistry, not sure why)"
Assuming the journalists have done their job...
It's the raw material needed to build the plastic again.
The enzyme takes the long chains, and spits out individual links.
Reassembling those links into new chains gives you back a new plastic.
"I watched it when it was first broadcast.... yes I'm that old...."
Although I was old enough to watch and be terrified by Dr Who, Doomwatch was deemed too adult and real for me by The Powers That Be, ie parents, but I did get a DVD box-set of the surviving episode recently. Most of it still stands the test of time very, very well.
McGeehan said: "We can all play a significant part in dealing with the plastic problem, but the scientific community who ultimately created these 'wonder-materials' must now use all the technology at their disposal to develop real solutions."
The problem is not the material but the use to which it is put. Sure, we need a technological solution to the issue but really we should simply have stopped using disposable 1-shot containers. Really, it boils down to who pays the hidden cost of disposal.
"we should simply have stopped using disposable 1-shot containers."
The Govester talking abpt this onradio 4 this morning. Showing off how he has a cup he can drink out of , and how thay will be bringing in "refill stations" for the platic water bottle problem .
I think he means taps.
Burn it and use pyrolisis reactors to make something else or just burn it as fuel with the right filters.
And then please use PEF..
This scheme + just burning in general in modern facilitires will be easier and more logical than the population separating the plastics so they get loaded in a ship sent towards some poor place, as we do now.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-burning-garbage-to-produce-energy-make-sense/
Not ideal, while relatively clean, it still pollutes.. but way better than other options, including direct landfill.
With the ash, you can make ceramics and concrete.
Flyash:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0008884603003867
Bottomash:
http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1757-899X/209/1/012082
So we basically would not throw away anything but reuse 100% of it and save money.. but some pollution would occur.
just burn it as fuel with the right filters
I think there should be a range of solutions and this should be one of them. Incineration 'done properly' can be a clean solution, especially if the furnaces are self perpetuating once started, the fuel being the plastic itself = low carbon footprint.
1 Buy the cheapest bottle of spring water available.
2 Place by the bed and drink as desired.
3 Refill from the tap when empty.
4 Rinse and repeat steps 2 & 3 until green stuff starts growing then go to step 1.
I normally get a year or two of use out of them before they need replacing.
NRT.
"1 Buy the cheapest bottle of spring water available.
2 Place by the bed and drink as desired.
3 Refill from the tap when empty."
I do a lot of driving. Insulated cooler bag, ice pack and the same disposable water bottle for, I think, about 3 years now. I go for the "sports" bottle type with the flip top cap and it only gets replaced if the flip top hinge wears out. They are remarkable durable for "one shot" water bottles. The current one is about 700ml, a decent size, and cost about 35p at ASDA. Fill every night, leave in the fridge and the bag + icepack keeps it cool all day except on rare very hot days and the car is parked up for more than a few hours.
The downside of many plastics, and many other packaging materials, and one of the reasons for shorter "best before" ("use by") dates on stuff that one would expect to keep for longer, is that the packaging material may (very) slowly disolve into the what it's holding, and sometimes the other way round as well. While a certain amount of this is expected, too much and the contained product is considered contaminated. This is one of the reasons behind much of the laminated, multi-material packaging which can't be separated and therefore can't be reasonable recycled - the laminated layer protects the content from the packaging.
It is something to beware of if you reuse plastic "disposable" bottles for too long - eventually they will contaminate what you're storing in them.
Modern incinerators have excellent scrubbers. Burn the stuff. Make power. Offset coal. Done.
The Solution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2xlQaimsGg
PS; Wander over to the ten rivers that make up 95% of the source of the plastic in the oceans, and politely ask them to please cut out the littering.
I wonder if it would be feasible to just put nets in those ten rivers, haul them out every so often and incinerate them on site.
If it's only 10 rivers, it could be doable using one year of the UK governments foreign aid budget.
What to do about all the fish getting caught would presumably be the main problem, although if the plastic floats, the nets could sit not far below the surface.
Recycling(TM) as practised currently is just money for the friends of legislators.
If you realistically want to limit it then any action has to be at the source rather than the consumer.
Built in obsolescence creates a mass of waste that can be addressed simply by making the manufacturer responsible for dealing with it - return to source. Consider buying a washing machine as an example, it is delivered and any packaging leaves with the delivery company. You buy a small item like a mobile phone and what you get it just the item with built in charging connectors.
Food packaging can also be addressed in the same way i.e. without any packaging and no non-consumable components at all, if you want to store it then it is in the consumer's reusable containers.
"Recycling" outside of manufacturers should never have been allowed and no amount of running around by consumers and government is going to be cost effective or viable in the long term.
This was not an accident as "Recycling" is just another tax on the consumer, if you want to get rid of the whole issue then do not allow it to be created in the first place. Ban any non-consumable product with a life span lower than the buyer and make manufacturer put up a bond so they cannot just go bust and leave the cost of dealing with their waste to everyone else. Make manufacturers exchange any consumable/faulty components in their products for free.
All this stupidity at not seeing that preventing waste being created in the first place is the only cost effective way of getting rid of the issue but then again whilst people get rich shuffling this waste around then expect the obvious to be ignored.
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