The Truth About Biodegradable Plastic
This week, the truth about “biodegradable plastic,” and new insights into how global warming might eventually make winters colder. Hosted by: Hank Green ---------- Like SciShow? Want to...
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Any given week, there’s always plenty of news that reminds us how messed-up our environment is. But this week, let’s talk about something we thought we had started to fix. Plastic. You see it everywhere -- it’s all over your grocery store, and at the Target and the Walmart, and also on the roadways, and in the water. And this is a problem, because plastic doesn’t biodegrade. Biodegradation is nature’s recycling system - microorganisms eat waste and convert it into nutrients that other organisms can use. For things like dead plant matter, that works really great. But microorganisms can’t eat plastic, so those grocery bags and shampoo bottles that you throw away just hang out until they’re broken down by heat or the sun’s ultraviolet radiatio...
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Any given week, there’s always plenty of news that reminds us how messed-up our environment is. But this week, let’s talk about something we thought we had started to fix. Plastic. You see it everywhere -- it’s all over your grocery store, and at the Target and the Walmart, and also on the roadways, and in the water. And this is a problem, because plastic doesn’t biodegrade. Biodegradation is nature’s recycling system - microorganisms eat waste and convert it into nutrients that other organisms can use. For things like dead plant matter, that works really great. But microorganisms can’t eat plastic, so those grocery bags and shampoo bottles that you throw away just hang out until they’re broken down by heat or the sun’s ultraviolet radiatio...
