We manufacture over 300 million tonnes of plastics each year for use in everything from packaging to clothing. Their resilience is great when you want a product to last. But once discarded, plastics linger in the environment, littering streets, fields and oceans alike. Every corner of our planet has been blighted by our addiction to plastic. But now we may have some help to clean up the mess in the form of bacteria that have been found slowly munching away on discarded bottles in the sludge of a recycling centre.Plastics are polymers, long thin molecules made of repeating (monomer) building blocks. These are cross-linked to one another to build a durable, malleable mesh. Most plastics are made from carbon-based monomers, so in theory they are a good source of food for microorganisms.But unlike natural polymers (such as cellulose in plants) plastics aren’t generally biodegradable. Bacteria and fungi co-evolved with natural materials, all the while coming up with new biochemical methods to harness the resources from dead matter.But plastics have only been around for about 70 years. So microorganisms simply haven’t had much time to evolve the necessary biochemical tool kit to latch onto the plastic fibres, break them up into the constituent parts and then utilise the resulting chemicals as a source of energy and carbon that they need to grow.

Source:- http://googleweblight.com/