Styrofoam becomes mortal

Longer title: Styrofoam stops being immortal.

Despite being made 95 percent of air, Styrofoam's manufactured immortality has posed a problem for recycling efforts. More than 3 million tons of the durable material is produced every year in the United States, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Very little of it is recycled.

Help may come from bacteria that have been found to eat Styrofoam and turn it into useable plastic. This is the stuff recycling dreams are made of: Yesterday's cup could become tomorrow's plastic spoon.

Kevin O’Connor of University College Dublin and his colleagues heated polystyrene foam, the generic name for Styrofoam, to convert it to styrene oil. The natural form of styrene is in real peanuts, strawberries and a good steak. A synthetic form is used in car parts and electronic components.


LiveScience.com

Well I think this is one of the greatest discoveries this millenium.
Now we can recycle styrofoam instead of leavig it as immortal trash.


Comments, Opinions?

This is excellent. Now they just need to dig up the land fills so that we can extract all the material that can be recycled - extract the metals and the plastics and process them appropriately.

There must be litterally millions of tons of recyclable material in landfills. I wonder at what point it becomes profitable to 'mine' the landfills.

Back on topic, this reminded me of other bacteria that have been discovered that 'eat' other toxic or otherwise nasty materials.

I love science. It is stuff like this that gives me hope for the future.

This is awesome! Finally McDonalds can go back to nice and warm foam nugget boxes instead of lame paper!

Unfortunately all the advancements in the world of recycling have yet to conquer the biggest culprit: people that don't recycle.

I think I am the only one in my entire building that actively seperates his recyclables and doesn't throw them in the dumpster. I even take my beer cans in to get my whopping $0.21 a pound.

Fuller and Feynman are turning out to be right, the next resource mines will be our garbage dumps. When Recycling technology gets advanced enough there won't be any need to seperate our recyclables. All garbage will just go straight to the reprocessing centers.

All garbage will just go straight to the reprocessing centers.

As long as it's economically viable. Recycling companies don't recycle out of the goodness in their hearts, they do it to make money. All the curb-side pickup companies in my city have recently stopped taking all glass because it costs too much with an insignificant return.

If technology permits profit to be made from the processing of all our waste, that would be miraculous. But this will not happen as long as it is cheaper to just top off a landfill.

How much bacteria will you need? WHere do you keep this bacteria? WHo will want to run such an operation?
Recycling it into plastic doesn't solve the problem (of styrafoam waste) much at all.

Considering the ever escalating amounts of plastic involved in our lives...

while not a perfect solution, it's a dang good one frosty. Imagine buying an energy star monitor whose casing was made out of 80% recycled material. Anything to give continued life to our current 10 year throw away culture saves us from having to destroy or maul that much more landscape.

Originally posted by Sugarlump
Considering the ever escalating amounts of plastic involved in our lives...

while not a perfect solution, it's a dang good one frosty. Imagine buying an energy star monitor whose casing was made out of 80% recycled material. Anything to give continued life to our current 10 year throw away culture saves us from having to destroy or maul that much more landscape.

HOw much of the styrafoam is recycled into plastic? 40%, 60%, 20%? How does one go about collecting this styrafoam in the first place? Hire people to go along city streets or rummage through city dumps? Still very early to tell whether it has any immediate application or any application at all.

Looks like it's a pseudomonas species as well.

Those critters have a remarkable penchant for adaptation.

While this particular species is known as P. putida, another pseudomonas species, P. aeruginosa is well known as the 'nylonase bug.' While this species does have this ability, the name 'nylonase bug' doesn't really give it the credit it deserves, as it's known for being able to digest a wide variety of xenobiotic compounds in addition to nylon oligomers.

A great find!