Experts! Ideas! Microplastics!

This week, we had the chance to talk to a couple of experts about our project. The first was an expert on the ocean ecosystem. She agreed that engineered cells might be able to mitigate the plastic pollution in the ocean, but she was quite concerned that the strategy would create a new problem. I suppose that's true, but the current pollution is literally killing everything in the ocean. Perhaps our project might disrupt the ecosystem, but at least there would be an ecosystem left to protect afterwards.

The second was an expert on using marine bacteria to degrade plastic. He was a) very enthusiastic and b) funny! Good to know scientists like him still exist! He told us about how the natural microbes degrading plastic might actually be bad for the environment, because they create so many microplastics. He also suggested some cool ways to make existing plastic more biodegradable, by adding trace nutrients like phosphorus, nitrogen and iron. However, I thought the coolest thing was all the work he has done studying the top micron of the ocean, and the plastic which acts as an extension of that. The bacteria up there have some really clever ways to adhere to and thrive on plastic!

So I think we need to make sure our project focuses disproportionally on microplastics, because we don't want to be generating more microplastics than we degrade. We also might need to move away from polystyrene, because it seems to degrade in UV light anyway.

The second expert also mentioned that microplastics seem to accumulate in fish and marine life. I had a crazy idea: what if we used the "E. Coli of the sea" to degrade plastics inside fish? The plastics would already be accumulated, and we would hopefully save a lot of fish from a death by plastic. Plus, the fish can do all the mechanical work of gathering plastic and expelling products of degradation, so we can just focus on the chemistry!