Kill Plastic Before It Kills Us

Plastic!!!! Yes it is one that has taken different forms to cater human needs since decades. It's uses got so deep rooted that it became a necessary evil to live with. It is a well known fact by now that though plastic has many uses, it has dreadful consequences in-terms of its disposal due to its non-degradable nature.

India alone  generates more than 5.6 billion  toxic plastic waste every year. As it is non-degradable, stays for years and when consumed causes serious health issues. As humans we know this and we just throw them off out of our premises without consuming. But do we really care about our environment? If not, at-least other creatures -animals like Cows, Dogs, Pigs etc that live in our surroundings that are highly prone to consume such disposed plastics. In earlier days, left out food and kitchen waste was thrown out which served as food source for some of the stray animals. Later with notion of becoming civilized, people started disposing waste by properly filling in plastics, tied and disposed.  Due to this many animals roaming around in our surroundings not knowing the effects of plastic, even eat plastic disposed openly on roads expecting to be filled with some food content. Years passed and in the name of "Swatch Bharat" in most of the cases directly the municipal sanitary workers come and collect garbage from home -to -home or firm to firm basis. On one side it is appreciable as it looks clean and tidy and minimizes growth and spread of undesired diseases through bacteria, mosquitoes etc. in residential areas. But there is other side of this novel idea of waste management that with this effort stray animals are completely snatched off their daily bread and many die out of hunger due to lack of food sources and lack of people who are sensitive to hunger of  roadside/stray animals. Anyhow this is another topic to be discussed.

Coming to our topic of "Kill Plastic Before It Kills Us", there have been several efforts of many environmentalists and  scientists to find an alternative to plastics. It is publicly known that complete elimination of plastic at this stage is impossible. But one thing to note is few forms of plastic use can definitely be eliminated, most famous forms of daily plastic usage being disposable bags and carry bags and Plastic bottles.

Interesting alternatives to reduce or eliminate plastic are:

1. Plastic Eating Bacteria:

Scientists have created a mutant enzyme that breaks down plastic drink bottles - by accident. The breakthrough could help solve the global plastic pollution crisis by enabling for the first time the full recycling of bottles.The new research was spurred by the discovery in 2016 of the first first bacterium that had naturally evolved to eat plastic, at a waste dump in in Japan. Later the crucial structure of the crucial enzyme was revealed.

The mutant enzyme takes few days to  start breaking down the plastic - far faster than the centuries that it takes in oceans. What researchers are looking at is to use the enzyme to completely turn this plastic back into its original components enabling 100% recycling of plastic. This means no digging for more oil required, fundamentally, reducing the growth of plastic content in the environment.
A patent has been filed on the specific enzyme by the Portsmouth Scientists and those from the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado.

One possible improvement being explored is to transplant the mutant enzyme into an "extremophile bacterial" that can survive temperatures above 70 degree Centigrade, at which point PET changes from a glassy look to viscous  state, making it likely to degrade 10-100 times faster.

2. EviGreen Bags:

As a tribute to Mother Earth, an NRI entrepreneur Ashwath Hegde along with a group of scientists and environmentalists after years of research  invented 100% organic  but plastic lookalike bags. The products of this material are named after the startup of the entrepreneur - Evigreen Biotech India Private Limited. 

These bags are made from pellets from natural starch (tapioca starch granules), vegetable oil derivatives and vegetable waste. Hence, making these bags non-toxic for environment, animals and human beings. EG bag dissolves instantly when submerged in water at 80 degree centigrade.

They were even tested by Organizations like, Karnataka State Pollution Board, Shriram Institute for Industrial Research etc. and proved to be 100 percent organic. These bags cost lesser than cloth-bags and bit higher than plastic ones.

The Tapioca fiber, vegetable waste and oils would be bought directly from the farmers which would be highly profitable and a good source of alternative income for them empowering the farmers in a unique way.

These bags are presently in use in Qatar and Abu Dhabi. Products available with Evigreen are - Carry Bags, Trash Bags, Bin liners, packaging films, laundry bags etc..
  

The post is last updated on 30th April 2018.

References:

For the content on  EviGreen products: - http://envigreen.in/  and the youtube channel "Tech 2 Tamil"

For content on Plastic eating bacteria - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/16/scientists-accidentally-create-mutant-enzyme-that-eats-plastic-bottles