Breaking down plastic using plastic eating bacteria, that’s what these two young scientists in Hungary are doing.
They’ve developed a bacteria cocktail that consumes any single-use plastic in seven weeks without prior chemical treatment or processing.
“I’m Liz Madaras, and I’m Krisztina Levay – and we’re the co-founders of Poliloop, a Hungarian bio-tech company which has developed plastic eating bacteria.”
The cocktail ingredients are highly secret, but Poliloop CEO Liz Madaras says if it can be mass produced, it could mean a significant step in reducing plastic waste globally.
“We saw plastic waste pollution as a very very pertinent issue. So we decided to try to combine biotechnology and chemical engineering to create a media which can actually bring plastics back into the natural life cycle to which they once belonged.”
After two weeks the process produces shreds of plastic. That then becomes a brown liquid “sludge” by the end of week seven. Initial lab tests show that the sludge is safe to use as a soil improver.
Read more on Yahoo News.