Scientists at University of California, Riverside (UCR) have devised a way to convert plastic waste into a highly porous form of charcoal that, when added to farmland soil, can improve water retention, contribute to aeration and even capture carbon. The technique entails mixing one or two common forms of plastic with the leftover stalks, leaves and husks from corn and compressing the resulting amalgam in …
There are several types of plastic in a single-use face mask, and they don’t easily decompose—instead winding up in the ocean. In fact, one face mask can release up to 173,000 microfibers per day into the sea which also contributes to the release of harmful chemicals. To tackle this waste problem, researchers studied the viability of making face masks out of pineapple leaves. Easily biodegradable, …
Following similar developments in England and France, a team of scientists at The University of Texas at Austin created an enzyme variant that breaks down plastic with the potential to eliminate billions of tons of landfill. The enzyme—dubbed FAST-PETase—targets polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a polymer found in consumer packaging that makes up 12% of global waste. Researchers used a machine learning model to generate mutations of a …
