Somehow, while I wasn't looking my calendar has snuck all the way round to July, which means we're right in the middle of Plastic Free July.
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If you haven't heard of Plastic Free July, it's a global movement aimed at helping people reduce their use of single-use plastics - ultimately reducing the amount of plastics heading into landfill.
I'm all for cutting out the unnecessary use of plastics and finding alternatives where we can.
But I'm also interested in what we can do about all that plastic waste that already exists.
So I was extremely interested to read recently about a potential solution: cows.
OK, so cows being the solution to our plastic woes seems a little unlikely.
And technically, it's not the cows, but the microbes that live in them.
New research from a team in Austria has found that microbes living in the rumen (one of the four stomach compartments of a cow) do indeed have the ability to breakdown at least some types of plastics.
A huge amount of the plastic we use in packaging (think plastic bags and bottles) is polyethylene terephthalate, or PET.
The problem with PET is that it's near on indestructible. Good for packaging - less good for our environment.
Unlike organic compounds that can quickly be decomposed by bacteria, fungi and other microbes, inorganic PET is broken down extremely slowly.
There are very few organisms that can naturally decompose it - meaning it persists for decades, or even longer, in the environment. This is where the cows come in.
A cow's rumen is filled with microbe-rich fluid.
It's estimated that every millilitre of this fluid contains somewhere in the order of 25 billion bacteria, 10 million protozoa and a few thousand fungi.
That's something like a quadrillion different microbes in the rumen of each and every cow.
And while most microbes can't break down PET, at least some of the billions of microbes found in the rumen can.
Researchers have discovered that the mix of microbes, rather than one specific type of bacteria, seems to do this most effectively.
The process worked best when the plastics were first made into a powder, rather than being left as larger pieces of film.
Anyway, it's not a good idea to go out and start feeding your plastic waste to the local neighbourhood cows.
But perhaps one day soon, the bacteria from our bovine friends might be helping us humans clean up our act.
Dr Mary McMillan is a senior lecturer at the School of Science and Technology, University of New England.
