Bacteria Eat Styrofoam 253
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."
Cancer anyone? (Score:5, Interesting)
I've seen this in action. (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
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)?
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)
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.
Re:Cancer anyone? (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't know how true this is, but when I was in highschool there was a book which was popular with the science guys called "Anarchist Cookbook". I remember something about disolving styrofoam cups in gasoline to make napalm.
Something that might be a little off topic, but I was reading the news and a highschool kid got expelled for browsing the web for the cookbook. When I was in highschool we were allowed to read anything we wanted.
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?
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.
Re:Cancer anyone? (Score:2, Interesting)
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: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.
Sony and a polystyrene recycling process? (Score:2, Interesting)
I think they even claimed it was implemented in Japan (I have no idea if this is true or not), with trucks that could pick up styrofoam and dissolve it en route, meaning they could pick up a LOT of material because most of the volume of styrofoam is air. Back at the processing plant, they clean the solution with filtering, recover the polymer chains, and make new materials, even stuff like pens, not just new styrofoam.
In short, does anyone know more about this, and why it hasn't been brought to the US? (besides our suckage at most things environmentally friendly)
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: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 towards a free society requires a healthy dose of this kind of talk -- for the sake of openness if nothing else -- whether you consider yourself suffering under tyrrany or not. Just part of staying vigilant.
Mind you, I don't live in 'The Land of the Free,' and don't really know what it's like to live under fear of having the Feds show up at the door because of a t-shirt, or being jailed for failing to produce my papers.
Information about making napalm with styrofoam wants to be suppressed... How about microbial expertise? I'm sure a real 21st century subversive 'cookbook' would find interesting uses for bacteria that can be tailored to only eat one industrial product.