Scientists recently developed biodegradable footwear that sea creatures can eat, in response to the growing problem of plastic pollution.
Newsweek reported that according to the scientists, the replacement for plastic could address pollution plaguing the oceans of the world by degrading enough to turn into consumable sea life.
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Footwear is an essential focal point. More so, shoes make up a large part of the plastic wage in the landfills and waters of the world, and plastic-based flip-flops are the most popular shoes in the world.
At present, plastic that pollutes the seas never degrade and rather breaks up into tinier particles until they turn into microplastics that live for hundreds of years.
Nonetheless, an interdisciplinary team at the University of California San Diego has produced materials that begin degrading after four weeks.
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A man washes plastic waste on the outskirts of Yangon on World Cleanup Day on September 17, 2022.
Biodegradable Shoes
According to Stephen Mayfield, the UC San Diego biologist who worked on the study, and also CEO of Blueview, the compostable sneaker company, no single discipline can solve the global environmental problems.
However, he elaborated, they have developed an integrated solution that's working on the land, and now, they know biodegrades as well, in the ocean.
To test their new invention in the water, the team met up in an aquarium with Samantha Clements, a marine biologist, and scientific diver at Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
The scientists took biodegradable polyurethane materials that they had developed before, to biodegradable in land-based compounds, which have already been turned into the first biodegradable shoes.
Materials Turn Into Food
As a result of this new study published in the Science of Total Environment journal, the team found all sorts of marine organisms colonized on the polyurethane foam and biodegrade the material back to their original chemicals, eaten as nutrients by the same microorganisms in the ocean.
Mayfield explained, he was surprised to see just how many organisms are colonizing the foams in the ocean. It turns out ot be something like a bacterial reef, a similar Today UK News report specified.
He added plastics should not go into the ocean in the first place, although if they do, this material turns into food for microorganisms and not plastic trash, as well as microplastics that endanger aquatic life.
The team of experts from polymer sciences, biology, marine sciences, and synthetic chemistry tracked the specimens and discovered the material started degrading after only four weeks in the sea.
Microorganisms That Can Break Down and Eat the Plastic Material
After that, the scientists were able to identify the microorganisms from six areas throughout San Diego that are capable of breaking down and eating the material.
Twelve years ago, researchers approximated that 17 billion pounds of plastic end up in the ocean every year, and a steep rise is forecasted by 2025.
Each time it goes into the water, the plastic waste disrupts marine ecosystems and migrates together to form mounds of trash like 0.6 million square miles, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Related information about edible plastics invention is shown on Tech Insider's YouTube video below:
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