No days wasted1/27/2024 ![]() That amount would be enough to rebuild a 6,000km stretch of the Great Wall of China every 12 months. While the technology may be a few years away, Dr Harvey said Australia still needed multiple ways to manage waste and plastic pollution because the environmental crisis continued to worsen.Ī 2020 paper published in ACS Sustainable Chemistry and Engineering found that humans were generating 400 million tonnes of plastic waste per year.Ībout 175 million tonnes of that is sent to landfill or pollutes the environment. So does this mean I can use as much plastic as I want? "There's really no reason why this type of research can't get expedited, given the enormous issues that we have globally, in terms of waste management and plastic pollution management," Dr Harvey said. He said it could and should be even sooner. "That is a fairly standard time frame for standing-start research through to commercialisation," Dr Harvey said. Yes we could, according to environmental scientist Paul Harvey, an expert on global plastic pollution who was not involved in the research. Could we really see a solution within five years? "Or even sooner should the investment be ready and available for us to accelerate that," he said. Professor Abbas said scaling up the process could take between three to five years. ![]() ![]() Researchers will now try to make the degradation process faster and more efficient by tweaking key aspects of the process such as temperatures, the size of plastic particles and how much fungus is used. The fungi, usually found in plants and soil, took 90 days to degrade 27 per cent of the plastic tested. The collapse of the national REDcycle scheme last year exposed big problems with Australia's plastic recycling systems and left most Australians without a way to recycle soft plastic. The challenge for researchers will be expanding any possible solution to address the nation's mounting piles of soft plastic. "That technology already exists for those processes and we're able to now borrow that learning from chemical process engineering and bring it into this particular process here." "It is scaling up which is very much similar to any kind of fermentation process," he said. Professor Abbas said he was "very confident" the technology could be scaled up to process thousands of tonnes of plastic a year, because the same techniques were already being used in different fields. ( Supplied: University of Sydney)ĭespite being recyclable, an estimated 13,500 tonnes of polypropylene ends up in Australian landfill every year because it is contaminated or mixed with other materials. University of Sydney scientists Ali Abbas (left) and Amira Farzana Samat (right) say the findings are significant.
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