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Marine Microbes Not Much Help Degrading Ocean-Floating Plastics
Summary
Despite plastics physically supporting microbial communities in the ocean, those microbes do little to actually degrade the plastic because polymer molecules are too large to enter bacterial cells. This explains why supposedly biodegradable ocean plastics persist rather than breaking down.
Although plastics physically support microbial communities in oceans, those communities do little to break down the vast amounts of supposedly biodegradable plastic rubbish and debris now floating on ocean surfaces. Part of the problem is that plastic polymers, even when carrying small molecules to enhance degradative reactions, are simply too big to enter microbial cells, according to polymer scientist Ann-Christine Albertsson of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, and her collaborators. One upshot is that microbes tend to degrade such plastics only partway, leaving hefty residues that marine scientists call microplastics floating slightly below ocean surfaces. Details appear in the April 2011 Environmental Science & Technology (45:4217–4227).