Most plastics are made from fossil fuels and end up in the ocean, but marine microbes can’t degrade them – new research
…. Overall, our findings suggest the global ocean microbiome has not yet evolved to efficiently degrade the many types of plastic pollution plaguing marine ecosystems. This highlights the ongoing danger plastic pollution poses for marine environments.
Developing solutions will likely require dramatically reducing new plastic waste, recovering existing ocean plastic and shifting to biodegradable plastic types.
While disappointing from an environmental remediation perspective, the lack of widespread microbial plastic degradation confirms the durability of synthetic polymers and highlights the vast challenge we face to clean up the oceans.
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