Daily Tech News

With hundreds of millions of tonnes of plastic  being produced  globally every year, the race is on to find environmentally friendly alternatives to things like water bottles, so that huge amounts of unrecycled waste don't end up in landfill or  the ocean . Some of the most promising solutions could be garbage-eating worms and plastic-eating bacteria , but what if there's an even simpler approach? Icelandic product design student Ari Jónsson had such an idea: for a biodegradable drinking bottle made from a material that, unlike plastic, doesn't leave a near-permanent problem behind after it's been used. "I read that 50 percent of plastic is used once and then thrown away so I feel there is an urgent need to find ways to replace some of the unreal amount of plastic we make, use and throw away each day," Jónsson told  Dezeen magazine . "Why are we using materials that take hundreds of years to break down in nature to drink from once and then throw away?...

Hundreds of millions of tons of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic are produced each year to package everything from sodas to shampoo. That only a fraction of this is recycled leaves much of it to rest in landfills and the ocean. But efforts to deal with this monumental mess may soon receive a much-needed boost, with scientists in Japan discovering a new bacterium with the ability to completely break down PET plastics in a relatively short space of time. A team led by Dr Shosuke Yoshida from the Kyoto Institute of Technology unearthed the bacterium, quite literally, by scooping up 250 debris samples from outside a PET recycling plant. Among the soil, sludge and other sediments, they discovered a bacterium that was actually feeding on PET as its energy and carbon source. When it was left alone in a jar with PET plastic, the scientists found that the material was completely broken down within a matter of weeks. At the heart of this healthy appetite for plastic were a pa...