For the past few days news on the plastic eating enzymes been offered as the solution for some of our plastic waste.
Is anyone old enough to remember the BBC Doomwatch program where aircraft were falling out of the sky because the plastic in them was being recycled this way?
A memory of some plastic eating bug that got out of control has been bugging me since I heard the news. I had thought it was based on a Sci-fi novel.
Tim
It is an enzyme that can digest PET discovered by researchers at Kyoto.
Several biological polymers also exist that degrade in the environment but they are nowhere near as good as engineering plastics. OK for golf tees and similar small objects that often get lost though.
Never been particularly commercially successful an ICI/Zeneca invention sold to Monsanto and then changed hands a couple more times since.
Yes. Plastic components turning to grey goo.
ISTR Prince Charles has wittered on about it too.
When I saw the item on BBC News this morning, I said "Doomwatch: The Plastic Eater". She couldn't remember.
It was attacking the plastic encapsulation of (SSI) chips, I remember.
I am pretty sure they did books of some of the more popular episodes, and I had that one at some stage. Not very good, as is mostly the case with converted scripts.
I just had a look, and I don't seem to have it any more.
Yes despite the hammy acting very scary. This I think was on the back of the Prince Charles Grey goo speech.
Brian
the stick melted !...yes I remember that......funny how things stick in your mind.......
found it...
PC _is_ grey goo!
On the subject of plastic waste, many of the fields around here are covered in polythene sheet ATM. From a distance they look like sheets of water, until you realise they're not horizontal. They are there to cover rows of potatoes, to warm the soil and bring them on early, to compete with 'new' potatoes from Egypt and Malta.
After harvesting the spuds in the Summer, the poly sheet is now dirty with soil etc. and the farmer has to pay for it to be recycled, as it has to be washed, and that's expensive. It's usually just bundled up and dumped in the corner of a field, sometimes set fire to on a still Summer's evening giving rise to a column of black smoke visible for miles.
No, not if I want to live.
You call your SWMBO "Doomwatch" ??
It all depends on whether the substance left after its been eaten is of any use or less harmful. Brian
It was Prince Charles who was to blame, but Doomwatch certainly did not help. Brian
If I recall it was accidental in the doomwatch story. If ever you develop something like that you need to also make sure you can destroy your creation in case it escapes out of the confines of its intended use case. I can see this increasingly being deployed as a weapon. Brian
Left to its own devices the organism will metabolise the plastic back to CO2 and H2O but by stealing its enzyme the researchers got something approximating the monomers/components that when polymerised form PET.
How bad you think mobile low MW phthalates are depends a bit on gender.
It isn't the only way to do it see 10.3 in
Oh no! We'll be inundated with Grey Goo! (That was the nanobots. What happened to them?)
Andromeda strain?
Andy Hamilton mentioned this on the BBC Radio 4 New Quiz. He said his plastic shopping bags always biodegrade as he lifts the shopping out of the car boot...
Rymans had a batch of plastic bags a few years ago that disintegrated if you kept them in the drawer for a few months. They had a message on them that told you to keep them for reuse.
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