Microbial clean-up strategy for eating garbage

Abstract

Bioremediation is the deliberate use of biological mechanisms to clean up pollutants, viz. hydrocarbons, oil, heavy metal, pesticides and dyes, by letting the microbes eat and digest toxic contaminants and consequently transform them into gases, water and other less toxic components. The indispensable habit of using products made out of plastic has led to the pollution havoc in the present day. The physical and chemical degradation methods do not provide an eco-friendly solution to disposal of garbage. Here, the usage of microorganisms has emerged as a key alternative offering solution to the challenges of reifying environment-friendly garbage clean-up. The resiliency of microorganisms to survive even the harshest of environmental conditions and the extreme diversity in microbial communities which comprise as many as 10, 000 distinct microbial species per gram of soil make them highly effective in bioremediation of almost all environmental pollutants. As such, bioremediation is a highly promising solution for the degradation, eradication, immobilization and detoxification of chemical and physical waste materials. In addition, the process is also cheaper in equipment and labour costs in comparison to the physical and chemical treatment solutions. So bioremediation has a great contributory role to play in solving many existing and future environmental problems.