A new plastic to replace... plastic!
13 December 2020
Scientists in New York and China have been working on a remarkable new plastic which will hopefully see the end to non-biodegradable plastic waste which pollutes habitats and enters food chains.
Nature has come up with the answer and it has been discovered that we can make plastic from DNA – the material found inside all living cells!
Presently, plastics are usually made from oil and petrochemicals, damaging our environment as the litter finds its way into oceans and other important habitats! These tiny particles of plastic do not break down and are devastating food chains and ecosystems globally.
Did you know that small particles of micro-plastics have been found in the snow in The Arctic?
The new plastic will be renewable, easy to break down and is easier to make than traditional plastic.
The scientists have calculated that they will need hundreds of millions of metric tonnes of DNA to keep up with the demand for plastic and have put forward the ingenious idea of using waste products from industry to help them. For example, yeast from fermentation can be used, the juice from food processing waste, or the waste from creating antibiotics can all be used to create the plastic that we need in our modern lives.
Once thrown away, it can be recycled but if it was to carelessly end up in the environment, it will completely biodegrade (which means that it will completely break down and not harm the local ecosystem).
This does sound almost too good to be true and it is unclear if there are any plans to widely start to use this method soon, but it definitely provides hope that a solution to the plastic waste crisis is just around the corner. In the meantime, the best thing that we can do is to reduce the amount of plastic products and packaging that we use in the first place.
TALKING POINT
Did you know that the era that we are living at the moment is called The Anthropocene?
It is used in geology* to describe that the Earth is currently dominated by human activity.
It is thought that in thousands of years from now, when geologists look at fossil and rock records from today, they will find a layer of plastic going through the soil.
What else do you think they might find that will have been preserved in the geological records?
*Geology - a science that deals with the history of the earth and its life especially as recorded in rocks
The original science can be found here! ⤴
