According to TASS agency, a team of Japanese scientists has found a species of bacteria that eats the polyethylene terephthalate, used all over the world in plastic products.
An estimated 50 million tons of plastic are produced annually worldwide. These plastic products are so far recycled through a complex energy consuming chemical process. Scientists used to believe that this material is not influenced by primitive organisms. However, Japanese researchers discovered a species of bacteria that can feed on plastic through a pair of enzymes secreted by this bacterium then uses the plastic to generate energy.
This kind of bacteria breaks down the polymer into carbon dioxide and water. During the testing, these primitive organisms broke down a thin membrane of polyethylene terephthalate. Nevertheless, setting special industrial techniques to degrade plastics with this type of bacteria will require a long time.
riod during which the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere was low. The results were later compared with the data of temperature increase over the last two millennia through exploring natural sources such as growth rings of trees, samples of coral reefs, and ice core samples in order to verify the accuracy of researchers’ results.
Using this method, scientists were able to calculate the average of change between 1971 and 2020. They found not only that most regions of the planet are out of normal range of temperature change but also; the average of change in Europe, North America, and North Pole is much higher than the mean rate in the rest of the world.
North Pole region is considered the most warming ever among other regions of the globe, whereas the decrease of the ice cap is increasingly accelerating. According to this study, the average of temperature increase in this part of the world could reach 1.1°F per decade by 2014.