Plastic-eating bacteria can help waste self-destruct

[Retro]

This idea is terribly well meaning, but I can just see it turning into a disaster through unintended consequences. I'm thinking of things like:

• Bacteria mutate and start causing problems everywhere such as poisoning the environment and causing infection epidemics
• Bacteria trigger too early causing the product to fail, perhaps catastrophically if it's a vehicle or something safety critical like medical equipment

I'm sure there's more things if I thought about it a bit more, but this is enough to be getting on with for now.

Scientists have developed a "self-digesting plastic", which, they say, could help reduce pollution.

Polyurethane is used in everything from phone cases to trainers, but is tricky to recycle and mainly ends up in landfill.

However, researchers have come up with a sci-fi like solution.

By incorporating spores of plastic-eating bacteria they've developed a plastic that can self-destruct.

The spores remain dormant during the useful lifetime of the plastic, but spring back to life and start to digest the product when exposed to nutrients in compost.

There's hope "we can mitigate plastic pollution in nature", said researcher Han Sol Kim, of the University of California San Diego, La Jolla.

Plastic-eating bacteria can help waste self-destruct

Scientists make a self-destructing plastic using plastic-eating bacteria in a sci-fi like development.

www.bbc.co.uk