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OK, this fungus breaks down polyethylene, which might even find a second use as fuel in combined heat and power stations. But a large part of microplastics fou
by jcynix 2y ago
OK, this fungus breaks down polyethylene, which might even find a second use as fuel in combined heat and power stations.
But a large part of microplastics found in aquatic environments is abraison from car tires. So we need more and different fungi ...
[sciencenews](https://www.sciencenews.org/article/car-tires-and-brake-pads https://www.sciencenews.org/article/car-tires-and-brake-pads...)
[theconversation](https://theconversation.com/how-your-car-sheds-microplastics https://theconversation.com/how-your-car-sheds-microplastics...)
[springeropen](https://microplastics.springeropen.com/track/pdf/10.1186/s43 https://microplastics.springeropen.com/track/pdf/10.1186/s43...)
- hinkley 2y agoAnd polyester from clothing. I don’t know what the fuck Patagonia thinks they’re doing switching to recycled polyester to make their clothing more environmental.
- shoulderfake 2y agoIts cheaper.
- bombela 2y agoMoney. They are making money. That's what it is, and you know it.
- therobots927 2y agoAs much as I like their clothes I can’t say I’m a fan of their holier than thou attitude. For example when the founder “gave the company away” but was pretty obviously just setting up a tax dodging structure. It’s like pick a lane dude, you can’t be a billionaire and a saint in this life.
- bitcoin_anon 2y agoAlthough it may be against popular opinion, I believe making billions without a healthy stock of virtues is unlikely.
- therobots927 2y agoWell you just deliberately moved the goalposts. I said billionaires are not saints. You said they have “virtues” by which I assume you mean intelligence and work ethic. Character traits that are typically not included in the definition of a saint.
- hinkley 2y agoAgreed. A “healthy stock of virtues” does not mean a stock of healthy virtues. We need a few more decades of inflation before anyone can rightly claim to become a billionaire without fucking people over.
- bitcoin_anon 2y agoVirtues are healthy by definition. There are no unhealthy virtues.
- bitcoin_anon 2y agoIt seems like you are moving the goal posts. > Virtue: Positive trait or quality deemed to be morally good Saints were certainly concerned with virtues.
- teachrdan 2y agoAm I missing something? If the polyester is recycled, then it was going to be disposed of -- and ultimately break down -- anyway. Using recycled materials of any sort reduces the consumption of new materials. This is a net positive for the environment, absent any extremes in the use of recycled materials. (i.e. extreme energy consumption or harmful chemicals used in the recycling process) Cotton is what most people think of as a natural fiber, and even its use can entail a high environmental cost. https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-023-00476-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-023-00476-z
- hinkley 2y agoLandfilled polyester doesn’t end up as microplastics.
- snowwrestler 2y agoLet’s say you have a fishing net that is end-of-life. It can be discarded, in which case it will break down over time into microplastics etc., in the ocean or a landfill. Or it can be recycled, in which case most of the plastic in the net is fixed into a new physical object. The second one seems better to me than the first one. Do you disagree? Or is your objection to the continued use of plastics in clothing at all?
- bsza 2y ago... or stop using cars for personal transportation where other options are available.
- 7speter 2y agoTrains have brakes, too. And horses... well, I guess we can handle cholera these days.
- nanomonkey 2y agoI believe most modern trains use regenerative braking for the majority of their deceleration. At least the hybrid and electric ones.
- mrguyorama 2y agoThe vast majority of braking done by trains is electrical, ie "regenerative" except lots of trains just burn the generated power in a grid of resistors and dump the heat. If every mile human beings moved in cars was replaced with two miles taken by train, the world would be a less polluted place.
- osmsucks 2y agoOne train can move many people at once (especially for peak commute times when people would be driving single-occupancy cars just to get to an office). It suffer from similar problems, but it's much more efficient at the same task.
- bongodongobob 2y agoNot feasible outside the metro areas of only the biggest cities in the US. I can tell you're from one of those cities because you act as if most people have a choice. We don't.
- bsza 2y agoI'm from a small European town. And I did say "where other options are available", so I don't get where your hostility is coming from.
- raisedbyninjas 2y agoThe scale of tire tread that just gets washed down into waterways seems staggering. It's probably no more egregious than other pollution sources though. Anyway, the napkin math is 20 million tons of tires manufactured per year. If 1% of that is lost as worn down tread (or sidewalls depending on the driver), then that is 200,000 tons of tire compound particles dispersed into the environment per year.
- jmb99 2y agoThat… actually doesn’t seem as bad as I thought it would be. Obviously it’s not going to be evenly spread across the globe, but that’s about (napkin math) 350μg/m^2/year. Even over a century that’s barely a light dusting (to be fair, of toxic/carcinogenic/etc microplastics that are likely much more highly concentrated around major highways and population centres, and their waterways). I always assumed it was orders of magnitude more than that. But that seems like an amount that, if it were to exist, some sort of bacteria/fungus/algae could actually probably handle.
- lynguist 2y agoThe car tires thing is proportionally an absurdly huge part! > In Switzerland, tire wear accounts for an estimated 90 percent of the microplastics released into the environment. https://www.admin.ch/gov/en/start/documentation/media-releases.msg-id-100009.html https://www.admin.ch/gov/en/start/documentation/media-releas... 90% (!) of microplastics in Switzerland’s environment are from tire abrasion. If we hypothetically radically banned cars, we would not only reduce landscape fragmentation, space requirements in public spaces, accidents and risks, damages to humans and animals, costs that are borne by the public, noise pollution and particulate matter air pollution, but also we would cut down microplastic emissions by 10:1!