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> 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.
by 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.