#missing plastic

[intelligentliving]

Here’s Where The World’s Plastic Waste Ends Up

Out of the 10 million tons of plastic waste that enters the ocean each year, we only see 1% of it – the portion that floats on the surface of the water. So, where is the other 99% of it? New studies show that ocean plastic is either pushed back...

[thoughtlessarse]

Bacteria eat some of the ocean’s ‘missing plastic’

When plastic enters the ocean, sunlight degrades it into “bite sized chunks”. Then bacteria eat some of it, researchers believe.

Where does the ‘missing plastic’ in our oceans go? Bacteria eat some of it, scientists have found. Around 12 million tonnes of plastic enter the oceans every single year. But sampling surveys only ever detect about one per cent of this deluge. Scientists at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ) think they’ve found a ‘jigsaw piece’ of this puzzle: bacteria are devouring it. When plastic enters the ocean, sunlight degrades it into “bite sized chunks”, explains Maaike Goudriaan, a doctoral student of NIOZ. It is then devoured by the bug bacterium Rhodococcus ruber, which digests it and excretes carbon dioxide. “This is the first time we have proven in this way that bacteria actually digest plastic into CO2 and other molecules,” Goudriaan says. “This is certainly not a solution to the problem of the plastic in our oceans. It is, however, another part of the answer to the question of where all the 'missing plastic' in the oceans has gone.”

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