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Mouse study suggests that starch-based microplastics may raise blood sugar, damage organs

Image by Nikolett Emmert from Pixabay

By Jo Nova

Remember how biodegradable plastic was going to make the world a healthier place? It would save us all from the horrible plastic landfill that lasts 1000 years, and it would protect the dolphins. Well, let’s just hope the dolphins don’t eat the bags.

Despite the rush to put biodegradable bags in every shopping centre, no one had bothered to study whether it had an effect on our health, and we still don’t know, but we can say that the mice on that compost heap with these biodegradable bags will be more likely to have diabetes, smaller ovaries, and liver damage. Degradable plastic affected their gut flora. The authors say: “Prolonged exposure to environmentally relevant doses of Starch-based microplastics can have widespread health effects.”

How many native mice will die that could have been saved, and do the Greens care?

This study came out in April:

Mouse study suggests that starch-based microplastics may harm health

Victoria Atkinson, c&en

While many studies have examined the health implications of ingesting petroleum-derived microplastics, none have looked at the long-term health effects on a living organism ingesting starch-based […]

December 30th, 2025 | Tags: , | Category: Health | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Plastic-eating bacteria have already evolved to eat our PET bottles and spread through global oceans

Image by Filmbetrachter from Pixabay

By Jo Nova

The Experts thought PET plastic was impossible to degrade naturally

WWF tell us it will take 450 years for a plastic bottle to break down. The US EPA says it will take up to 1,000 years. And the UN says “plastic is forever”. But now that we’ve banned plastic straws and picnic spoons, and changed our shopping bags and spent hours sorted our rubbish, it turns out bacteria have already evolved to capture the energy left in the plastic. And furthermore, they weren’t just in one shallow bay, they found them spread throughout the world’s oceans.

Presumably there will be some microbes working on our landfill that we don’t know about. If not now, then soon.

How much of our recycling is just a waste of time and money?

Life on Earth was never going to leave a free meal sitting around

In 2016 researchers found one sort of bacterium in a Japanese recycling plant was able to live off the plastic waste. Now we know that the enzyme PETase breaks down plastic, and that it is found in marine bacteria too. Researchers looked at 400 sites around the world […]

November 7th, 2025 | Tags: , | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Plastics are not forever: Bugs already evolved 30,000 new plastic eating enzymes

flockine

Plastics are a free dinner for life on Earth so it was just a matter of time before microbes evolved to eat it.

A PET bottle normally takes 16 – 48 years to break down, but if it were lunch for microflora it would take weeks instead. Hydrocarbons are ultimately just different forms of C-H-O waiting to be liberated as carbon dioxide and water. The only question was “how long” it would take bacteria and fungi to break those unusual bonds.

Sooner or later all plastic will be biodegradable.

Polyethylene-terephthalate (PET)

The first bacteria known to chew through PET bottles was discovered at a Japanese rubbish dump in 2016. But we had no idea then just how advanced the microbial world of plastic processing was.

Instead of hunting for single bacteria Zrimec et al mined through collected metagenomes of soil and ocean and found not just 5 or 10 new enzymes but 30,000. It appears that they could metabolize at least ten different types of plastic.

And in places where there was more plastic pollution, there were more enzymes. All over the world a whole new ecosystem is rising out of the puddles and bubbles […]

January 4th, 2022 | Tags: , , | Category: Microbiology | Print This Post Print This Post | |