Recently, scientists have developed a shoe product that can biodegrade in seawater to the point where it can be fed to marine life. The new material will replace plastic products and degrade enough to be consumed by marine life, thus solving the pollution problem plaguing the world's oceans, according to the researchers.
Footwear makes up a large percentage of the plastic waste in the world's oceans and rivers, as well as in landfills, and has become a focus of attention, including the most popular plastic flip-flops.
An interdisciplinary team at the University of California, San Diego, has developed a material that begins to degrade after just four weeks. According to Stephen Mayfield, a biologist at the University of California, San Diego, who participated in the study, "No single discipline can solve a pervasive environmental problem, and we have developed a comprehensive solution that works on land, but now we know it is equally biodegradable in the ocean."
To test their new material in the water, the research team met with Samantha Clements, a marine biologist and scientific diver at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, at an aquarium. They brought a previously developed biodegradable polyurethane material on land, which we have used to make the first pair of biodegradable footwear products.
Currently, plastics that pollute the oceans never degrade, but only break down into smaller particles and eventually into microplastics that can remain in the ocean for centuries.
The team found that various marine organisms gathered on this polyurethane foam material, acting like a microbial reef, biodegrading the material back to its original chemicals, which were then consumed as nutrients by microbes in the ocean. A team of experts from biology, polymer science, synthetic chemistry and marine science followed the test samples and found that the material began to degrade after only four weeks in the ocean. Researchers found microbes capable of breaking down and eating this material at six sites in San Diego.
Researchers estimate that 17 billion pounds of plastic end up in the ocean each year, and that number is expected to rise sharply by 2025. When plastic waste enters the ocean, it destroys marine ecosystems and migrates together to form huge piles of trash, such as the 600,000 square mile Pacific Garbage Patch.
