4 ms·
This is a semi-valid concern. It would take a relatively small amount of an organism to contaminate something, and unless you're regularly cleaning everything m
by ryanmercer 8y ago
This is a semi-valid concern. It would take a relatively small amount of an organism to contaminate something, and unless you're regularly cleaning everything made of those types of plastics you could have some real issues.
We fight mold and termites now in our living spaces, imagine if you had a plastic-eating organism and a little bit took up residence in a hotel, an office, your car, a bus or train, your house.
Even if it was relatively slow at breaking down it could cause considerable cosmetic damage. A little gets on your laptop display. You leave it at home and go on vacation for a week, you come back and some light etching has occurred over streaks of your monitor and the screen is now fogged and needs replaced, you wipe the exterior down as best as you can before replacing the screen and are pretty sure you got it all. Your screen gets replaced, your laptop works great again until a month later you pick it up and your spacebar falls off, the plastic switch entirely degraded, you open up the laptop only to find most of the internal plastic is structurally compromised, you unknowingly transferred some of the organism inside when you replaced your screen.
Here in Indiana, sometimes in the spring and summer, there's this fungus called 'lawn rust' that has orange spores that resemble rust and get on your lawn and will even get on vehicles (which will just wash off) but imagine something getting in the wild and landing on your car with a largely plastic body... go a week or a month without washing your car and you might get home from the car wash one day and notice your bumpers are pitted, oh darn the future plastic eating bacteria/fungi strikes again.
Even if only kept this stuff in industrial facilities, unless you go NASA level clean-room when leaving the facility it'd be damn easy for some to hitch a ride on someone headed home from work and, well, "life will find a way".
- dsfyu404ed 8y agoSo basically like rust or rot but for plastic. I don't think it would be that big a deal. For the longest time things were built with leather and wood instead of rubber/plastic and society survived just fine. I think a lot of people are over-reacting to the idea of plastic rotting because they live in the Southern California filter bubble where nothing rots or rusts (because it's basically a desert) and so the idea that one wouldn't just be able to leave materials outside and expect them to be just fine is foreign to them. Having materials naturally degrade over time is just a fact of life everywhere else on the planet.
- njarboe 8y agoYea. But wouldn't be great to be able to build things that would last a long time in the elements?
- munk-a 8y agoMaybe? Probably not, we'd probably end up making single use water bottles out of a material that miraculous.
- bmurphy1976 8y agoSure, but if the trade-off is permanent climate change and environmental destruction, maybe a little continuous renewal would be a good thing.
- jimmaswell 8y agoWhy would bacteria or fungi breaking down plastic help climate change?
- bmurphy1976 8y agoThat's not what I meant although my wording doesn't help. An environment completely polluted by plastic that we just keep pumping more into it? Bad. A world where we live a bit more harmoniously with nature, making products that are compatible with long-term maintenance of our environment? Good. That type of thinking tends to go hand-in-hand with addressing climate change.
- jimmaswell 8y agoDoesn't seem like helpful categorization to me, especially if the decomposition of plastic ended up making its own CO2. Though apparently burning plastic and capturing the energy may result in less CO2 release than putting it in a landfill: https://phys.org/news/2009-08-plastic.html https://phys.org/news/2009-08-plastic.html
- 8y ago
- isomorphic 8y agoFor details see Ill Wind, The Andromeda Strain, probably several other (wildly) speculative novels and stories I'm unaware of, etc., etc.