Scientists Identify Microbe That Could Help Degrade Polyurethane-Based Plastics
27th March 2020
German researchers report in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology that they have identified and characterized a strain of bacteria capable of degrading some of the chemical building blocks of polyurethane.
“The bacteria can use these compounds as a sole source of carbon, nitrogen and energy,” said Dr. Hermann J. Heipieper, a senior scientist at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research-UFZ in Leipzig, Germany and co-author of the new paper. “This finding represents an important step in being able to reuse hard-to-recycle PU products.”