Thursday May 22nd, 2008
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From Styrofoam to Sutures?
Posted by Hillary Rosner on February 22, 2006 - 2:11pm.
Could Styrofoam someday be biodegradable? New research has found that microbes can help turn the notoriously hard-to-break-down material, which ends up in landfills where it remains for centuries, into a biodegradable plastic that could also have uses in medicine and other fields.
Polystyrene foam amounts to 14 million tons of waste generated in the U.S. per year, according to the EPA. The new procedure could help keep it out of landfills and make it a recyclable material like paper or plastic. The technology uses a method of heating without oxygen, and a common soil bacteria, to turn polystyrene into a PHA – a polyester that can be used in many orthopedic processes, as anything from a suture to a stent to a bone graft material.
More research is needed to see if the process can be made more efficient as well as cost-effective.
[via Environmental Science and Technology Online]
Image credit: NOAA
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This is great news but a little alarming to learn that it could be used as a stint or bone graft. What would happen if a bacterium from an infection near an area where the graft is reacts to the bacteria in the new styro-material? I suppose if Styrofoam can sit in the ground for thousands of years undisturbed it can serve as a human bone for 50 of more.