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This is why I get scared when I see articles about people developing plastic eating bacteria. Sure it is great for reducing waste but it’s a dangerous game to b
by bilsbie 4y ago
This is why I get scared when I see articles about people developing plastic eating bacteria. Sure it is great for reducing waste but it’s a dangerous game to be playing for sure.
- jacquesm 4y agoNo, plastic was the mistake. That was the dangerous game, those plastic eating bacteria are one way to restore some of the natural order and hopefully at some point they'd run out of food.
- riversflow 4y agoHow is “plastic was the mistake” any more reasonable than “electricity was the mistake” Plastic is indispensable just like electricity.
- jacquesm 4y agoPlastic is indispensable completely unlike electricity is indispensable. Plastic is a huge pollutant, with breakdown stats that make you cry once you start thinking in terms of tons of absolutely indestructible stuff that makes it into our environment every day. Only a very small fraction of that stuff really needed to be made from plastic. Mostly it is just done because it is cheap and mechanically well understood. And because - tadaaaa - it lasts longer than most other materials. But the result is that the plastic invariably outlasts everything else, and it is super hard to recycle it efficiently unless it was expressly made to be recycled, which it rarely is. Electricity is a highly fungible form of energy, in every way that matters unlike plastic and for which we do not have any alternatives that come close to having the same kind of properties for everyday use.
- nomel 4y agoWhat do you see as the material that could have been used, or could be used, to replace plastic?
- jacquesm 4y agoIn many applications glass or treated paper was used prior to plastic and it usually worked well enough to give a reasonable service life. Lots - and I mean really lots - of applications where plastic is used today it could still be replaced by either paper, glass or sometimes wood. Using plastic for the remaining use cases would be fine by me. But plastics for 'economics' reasons is just a temporal form of externalization.
- mattkrause 4y agoThose microbes require very specific conditions: precise pH and osmolarity, high temperature (50-70˚C), long contact times, feedstock that's been literally pulverized, etc. These probably aren't going to occur anywhere outside of a bioreactor, so our action figures are likely safe...for now!
- jwilk 4y agoFYI, you used an incorrect character for the degree sign. Should be ° U+00B0 DEGREE SIGN, not ˚ U+02DA RING ABOVE.
- mattkrause 4y agoHmmmm...it's whatever Option+k does on macOS. I thought it was the degree sign because it doesn't actually combine, but apparently degree is option+shift+8 instead.
- evan_ 4y agoAn acquaintance just about had a nervous breakdown recently because they somehow used ˆ (option+i, used for e.g. î) in a regex instead of ^ and couldn't figure out why such a basic thing was failing.
- usmannk 4y agoor just option+0, because degree is like a little 0 I guess?
- mattkrause 4y agoHa! I had been thinking Option-K like Kelvin (also a unit of temperature--but ironically one that isn't properly a "degree". Maybe that should have been a hint!) Option-zero has a tiny underbar for me, which I think is in Bulgarian(?) abbreviations.
- jwilk 4y ago
- MichaelCollins 4y agoIt doesn't seem like a problem to me. Wood rots, but wood furniture and even buildings can easily last for centuries if cared for.
- kortex 4y agoI wouldn't worry. Lignin (in wood) is a bit more reactive than polyolefins. It was effectively indigestible for eons until fungi figured out how to break it down, and even then, wood only breaks down in certain conditions.