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Plastic-Eating Mushrooms (2021)
- Jolter 4y agoBut this is “Mushrooms eating plastic”!?
- cto_official 4y ago(Plastic eating mushrooms) eating plastic
- betwixthewires 4y agoPlastic's main selling point is it's durability, it's resistance to decay. But it's basically made of organic compounds, the thing that makes it durable is it's novelty in the environment and this resistance to decay will not last long. The day will come when it rots like paper, and it's much closer than we think.
- red_trumpet 4y agoI think plastics main selling point is not its longevity, but the possibility to easily form objects of many shapes. What makes you believe "rot like paper" is more appropriate than "rot like wood"?
- pmichaud 4y agoWood is thicker, denser, and has more structure than paper. My guess is that paper is a closer analogy in this case.
- wyago 4y agoThis is probably accurate for films and fabrics, but I wouldn't be surprised if thick solids would be at least as slow to rot as wood. I don't know what proportion of plastic mass is in each form though.
- marcosdumay 4y agoPaper is porous. Metal sheets are closer to it. Any biological digestion of plastic will be either a very slow process focused on microplastics or have a large mechanical component.
- culi 4y agoWood is a nice analogy because when it was first evolved there was nothing on earth that could break down the lignin. As a result, we had a couple thousand years where wood just piled up like a global waste crisis. Eventually fungi got really good at dealing with it We're again seeing a waste crisis due to a novel material and once again fungi might end up saving us (though we don't have a thousand years to wait this time)
- mrcartmeneses 4y agoIt was several million years
- trident5000 4y agoPutting my sci-fi/apocalypse tin foil hat on: Someone engineering an airborne bacteria that lives off plastics would probably collapse the world economy and kill half the population.
- alchemist1e9 4y agoI’m relieved I’m not the only one who immediately thought of what could go wrong. I’ll admit I didn’t think of the airborne part but I did immediately think of it escaping the landfills.
- kwhitefoot 4y agoYou're fifty years late. Doomwatch did an episode called The Plastic Eaters in 1970. "A plane dissolves in mid-air, its plastic components eaten away. Doomwatch faces its first challenge: to halt the disastrous spread of a man-made virus with the power to melt all plastic." https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0564476/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0564476/
- tomtom1337 4y agoHyphens are important.
- scaredginger 4y agoDamn, this is disturbingly close to "Eats, shoots and leaves"
- Oarch 4y agoThe comments made me realise there's at least 3 meanings: Mushrooms that eat plastic. Plastic that eats mushrooms. 'Eating mushrooms' (ie edible) that are made of plastic. Any more?
- raffraffraff 4y agoLet's give that sentence to AI and see what image it produces
- rroot 4y agoHere we go: https://imgur.com/a/v3VhRR9 https://imgur.com/a/v3VhRR9 Created by DALL-E using the prompt "Plastic Eating Mushrooms".
- adhesive_wombat 4y agoI like that one of them is a fly agaric (the classic red with white spots toadstool) that's poisonous. While you can eat them after boiling, it's not really a go-to example for an "eating mushroom". Really shows that there's still a lot of context blindness in AI. Also it seems to have glommed firmly onto the "mushrooms for eating, that are made of plastic" parse.
- raffraffraff 4y agoCan we eat the mushrooms afterwards? Would be great if we could indirectly eat plastic waste, during these hard times.
- doctor_eval 4y agoFTA: > Researchers have now found that many species are capable of plastic bioremediation including the common, edible Oyster mushroom. The Oyster mushroom is capable of decomposing plastic while still creating an edible mushroom.
- Timwi 4y agoAm I the only one who's tired of these types of news articles that describe an exciting-sounding possible, hypothetical future innovation and present it as if it were already here? We've heard the same about “clean” nuclear power, about efficient energy storage in massive batteries, electric zero-emissions passenger aircraft, what have you. None of these things are real yet. Please, can we have news about things that are actually real? Tell me about the plastic-eating mushrooms when there is a landfill (or ocean) in which the mushrooms are actually, actively eating plastic. Until then, this is smoke and mirrors and creates an unhealthy false hope.
- nsgi 4y agoHow does it present it as if it were already here?
- metacritic12 4y agoDo you have another path that you prefer more -- maybe degrowth?
- cassepipe 4y agoEven more so than some of those technologies, although they sound very promising don't address the issue about the intensity of the energy expenditure required by the developped world mode of life, and we are wasting most of it. Decarbonize everything but keep going like yesterday won't cut it. So your algae shoes are great but it is not sustainable to buy a pair every month. You plastic eating bacteria are great but we can't keep using so much plastic anyways. It's not that I don't want it to be possible, it's just that the current reports about the state of the planetary climate system seem to indicate that we are on the edge of a cliff and that we have to make the best/choices decisions to avoid falling off of it. It's not going to happen, it is happening. Please people don't call me a doomer and stop the denial. Go listen to the people that are actually studying climate. They're are not happy about it. And rich smart tech people are not here to save you. They will buy themselves islands with private guards is what they're gonna do.
- lizardactivist 4y agoAbout the title, what is the difference between plastic eating mushrooms, and plastic-eating mushrooms?
- uj8efdkjfdshf 4y agoIt's the difference between a plastic that eats mushrooms and a mushroom that eats plastic.
- mrob 4y agoThe hyphen makes it unambiguous that "plastic-eating" modifies "mushrooms". Without the hyphen it could refer to some hypothetical type of plastic that eats mushrooms. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_modifier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_modifier
- bawolff 4y agoI think it was pretty clear from context which was meant.
- kragen 4y agoIf these fungi are really capable of eating polyurethane in anaerobic environments, we'd better hope they can't do the same with polypropylene and polyethylene, because if so the polypropylene liners modern landfills depend on to keep their contents out of the groundwater are going to start leaking pretty soon. (Some landfills use geomembranes of other polymers, too.)
- preston4tw 4y agoThere's a fun trashy sci-fi novel I read years ago about how potentially devastating it would be if a plastic-eating microbe got loose: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2368220.Mutant_59 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2368220.Mutant_59 It reads like a summer disaster movie, entertaining but mostly forgettable. What was interesting about the book was as a thought experiment about the use of plastics in critical infrastructure and how much of a nightmare plastic-eating anything could be.
- kragen 4y agoI think the backstory of the Ringworld series was that a superconductor-eating microbe destroyed civilization on the Ringworld, and restarting it was impossible because there were no metals or fossil fuels to mine. On the plus side, on actual Earth, at least most of the metals are still in the landfills.
- drak0n1c 4y agoDoes this digestion actually break down the molecules into biodegradable organic compounds? If it leaves a significant portion intact it may just drastically increase the amount of microplastics.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- TedShiller 4y agoThis is cool, but how do we prevent "good" plastics (for example buried PVC pipes and fiberoptic cables) from being eaten in the future, and only bad plastics targeted?
- culi 4y agoMaybe we should change the way we think about architecture. Japan has some of the longest lasting buildings in the world and it's because they're specifically built with modularity in mind. It's built with the knowledge that parts will rot and have to be replaced and built in a way where you can replace a part of it without the whole thing collapsing. Maybe we should think of our buildings the same way and just admit that pipes are gonna break and nothing lasts forever. And plan for it rather than against it. I think that's where the software industry has naturally evolved with SaaS and where a lot of other industries are slowly evolving towards. Maybe it's time for architecture to do the same
- userbinator 4y agoLooks like it's only for polyurethane, which is already not really very stable for a plastic, as anyone who has experienced old foam items disintegrating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyurethane#Degradation_and_environmental_fate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyurethane#Degradation_and_e... As for the more inert plastic waste, as the other comments here have mentioned already, the fact that it's inert means it really isn't a problem. It'll just exist naturally and perhaps get mined in the future for recycling.
- culi 4y agoEdit: I linked an irrelevant paper due to a misreading
- pflanze 4y agoThe title of the paper at your link is "Acute toxic effects of polyethylene microplastic on adult zebrafish". Polyethylene[1] is not the same thing as Polyurethane[2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyethylene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyethylene, [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyurethane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyurethane
- culi 4y agoWow, my bad. Thanks
- GuB-42 4y agoThere is something I find a bit confusing with the idea that we should find ways of degrading plastics. Our big concern right now is climate change, and it is in large part driven by CO2 emissions. Plastic is sequestrated carbon, degrading plastic means finding life forms that turn plastic into CO2. Why do that when we are trying so hard to avoid putting more CO2 in the atmosphere. And should we want do destroy that plastic, we can burn it in furnaces and use that energy for ourselves. As expected, the article mentions unproperly disposed plastic that ends up where it shouldn't be. Plastic-eating mushrooms won't solve that problem unless they work and spread in the wild, which is highly unlikely: these solution usually require very specific conditions. For example PLA is technically biodegradable, but unless you are using an industrial compost plant, it won't. And if these mushrooms work in the wild, we will have a bigger problem...