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The technology of landfills has massively improved over the years. It's not the old pile of garbage covered in birds forever; they turn them into parks and what
by kulahan 3y ago
The technology of landfills has massively improved over the years. It's not the old pile of garbage covered in birds forever; they turn them into parks and whatnot. It's probably worth looking up, because there's some cool scientific advancements behind it.
I'm pulling this next sentence completely out of my ass, but I also imagine it would be convenient, once we develop bacteria to break this stuff down in an environmentally friendly way, to just pour it over these contained blocks of waste.
- ianlevesque 3y ago> once we develop bacteria to break this stuff down in an environmentally friendly way Sounds as mythical as plastic recycling to me to be honest.
- SpaceNoodled 3y agoMicroorganisms are already evolving to consume plastics. https://www.wsl.ch/en/news/searching-for-plastic-gobblers-in-alpine-soils/ https://www.wsl.ch/en/news/searching-for-plastic-gobblers-in...
- ianlevesque 3y agoYeah, people have also gotten mealworms to eat Styrofoam. My concern is more that the plastics industry successfully pushed plastic recycling heavily with marketing so that growth of their products would continue, even as said recycling was just dumping the material in developing countries where it mostly ended up burned or in the ocean. There can be a huge, huge disconnect between technically possible and what happens in the real world.
- kulahan 3y agoI'm mostly fantasizing about it because I've read about plastic-eating bacteria and radiation-powered bacteria, so it seems possible to do, like, anything. But yeah I fully admit it's probably mythical to some degree.
- manuel_w 3y agoI was once told by a chemist that bacteria breaking down plastic is not an unthinkable thing. He said it's chemically quite similar to something existing (fat?), so once bacteria stop ignoring plastic due to details in their chemical fingerprint, they can break it down. They would be able to do so already if not for said details. Hope I remember correctly.
- grogenaut 3y agoI'm super excited for all the plastic in the world and all the devices that we use everyday to rot because we developed a bacteria that eats it and now your iPhone internals have an infection and your phone just disintegrates and the steering wheel falls off your car
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 3y agoWould you do me a kindness and let me know later if sarcasm gets through people who can’t care about the environment a bit more than their own consumption? I’ve tried reason but it never works.
- xkekjrktllss 3y agoMaterial security is the best predictor of environmentalist political priorities. Nothing else even comes close.
- lazide 3y agoIf you think about it, there are strong evolutionary incentives for people to take from someone/something else rather than reduce their own consumption voluntarily. Hell, it’s what all ecosystems are built on!
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 3y ago[flagged]
- Loughla 3y agoRingworld. That's the basic idea of the underlying society wide failure in that book.
- calamari4065 3y agoExcept that bacterium was introduced as a weapon specifically to destroy that society. Weren't they trying to take control of the ring once society collapsed?