Microbial Degradation of Synthetic Plastics Released from COVID-19 Generated Single Use Disposable Face Masks

Since the past few decades, plastics accumulation in the farm soil unravels an alarming sign of concern for the human health and soil microbiota. An increased surge of single-use plastics has been recorded due to the outbreak of Covid-19. The monthly consumption of surgical masks exceeded more than 120 billion and medical gloves were 60 billion by the end of 2020. Microorganisms being susceptible in nature display receptive responses to the soil reformed by the accretion of discarded microplastics pollutants which contribute to the microbial plastics degradation. Bacteria being ubiquitous are one of the largest populated groups inhabiting soil communities propelled by the ability to produce impending enzymes capable of degradation. The present study aims to isolate and identify native plastic degrading bacterial strain by collecting soil sample from the open, cluttered, deserted farmlands of Bhubaneswar city in the state of Odisha, India. Bacterial colonies were isolated by serial dilution technique on nutrient agar plates supplemented with Polyethylene glycol and well-defined isolated bacterial colonies are selected and pure cultured with proper growth conditions. The bacterial strain with tolerance to microplastics supplemented medium is molecularly identified as Staphylococcus sp. The revealed nucleotide sequences of the extracted strain were uploaded in the GENBANK, NCBI database and given the accession number OP363711. In the current investigation, the efficiency of bacterial-mediated biodegradation of synthetic plastics released from Covid-19 generated single use disposable face masks was examined on a lab scale in a conical flask on a shaker for 30 days at 37° C with a speed of 200 RPM. Given that synthetic polymers decay slowly, the reduction of molecular weight after 20 days showed that bacterial breakdown was only 2% efficient. The findings and conclusions of this study is to better comprehend and cognize bacterial strains that can be applied for microplastics biodegradation.