Every year, more than 30 billion water bottles are added to America's landfills, creating a mountainous environmental problem. But if research at Missouri S&T is successful, the plastic bottles of the future could literally disappear within four months of being discarded.

The days or weeks even that it might take you to throw away that plastic water bottle in back of your car is nothing compared to the time it takes to decompose in a landfill.

Try never.

But new research from Missouri University of Science and Technology in Rolla may help whittle decomposition time to about four months, helping solve a major environmental problem.

The research team is constructing new kinds of biodegradeable and bioavailable plastics to help reduce the amount of time the plastic stays in the nation's rapidly filling landfills. Bioavailable plastics contain substances that can be absorbed by living organisms such as plants.

Via St. Louis Post-Dispatch.