LiveScience.com - Immortal Styrofoam Meets its Enemy

LiveScience.com - Immortal Styrofoam Meets its Enemy

This is not the stuff that makes up my usual blogs - most of my blogs are 'hate-filled rants' about terror and injustice or silly stuff.

This is an article that really made me happy.

Styrofoam - the stuff we all use but feel guilty about using - is about to finally lose its stigma as un-recyclable and harmful to the environment.

There's an old joke that if you were reincarnated, you might want to come back
as a Styrofoam cup.
Why? Because they last forever. Ba-dum-bum.
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.
Anyway, the scientists fed this styrene oil to the soil bacteria
Pseudomonas putida, which converted it into biodegradable plastic known as PHA
(polyhydroxyalkanoates).
PHA can be used to make plastic forks and packaging
film. It is resistant to heat, grease and oil. It also lasts a long time. But
unlike Styrofoam, PHA biodegrades in soil and water.
The process will be
detailed in the April 1 issue of the American Chemical Society journal
Environmental Science & Technology.