4 ms·

Unless your kitchen is flooded, plastic food packaging generally doesn't face the sort of warm, wet environments needed for most fungi and microorganisms to gro

Unless your kitchen is flooded, plastic food packaging generally doesn't face the sort of warm, wet environments needed for most fungi and microorganisms to grow. (The sterilized and/or nutrient-deficient insides of food packaging doesn't count.) Marine uses of plastic (fishing nets, ropes, swimwear, buoys, etc.) seem likely to be impacted first. Along with infrastructure (sump pumps, farm irrigation equipment, ...). Then general outdoor uses.

sva_ 2y ago
What if you live in a humid, warm, tropical environment?
- bell-cot 2y ago
  Do things which old-fashioned fungi can break down, given time and water - physical books, wood furniture, natural fiber clothing - need any special treatments to survive in your environment? Figure that these plastic-rotting fungi won't be all that much different from the ones you're familiar with. This is not some SciFi "and the Nanotech Gray Goo ate the entire earth in a week" story.
  - bregma 2y ago
    > This is not some SciFi "and the Nanotech Gray Goo ate the entire earth in a week" story. Not yet.
    - bell-cot 2y ago
      "Life Finds a Way, Inc." has had a planet-sized laboratory, running its Natural Mutation Engine 24x7x365, for a billion-ish years now. But no Gray Goo has actually evolved, and taken over the Earth. Perhaps, "Gray Goo" is just another cool-sounding trope, and not a real-world possibility?
      - immibis 2y ago
        Grey Goo has evolved in many incarnations. First was "unicellular life" edition. Most recently the planet has been taken over by "humans".
        jerf 2y ago
        Part of the Grey Goo memeset is that the goo is an unstoppable apex predator that doesn't just tweak the ecological balance a bit in a conventional ecological relationship, but permanently establishes an ecological balance of 100% Grey Goo. This has not happened, not even "humans".
        saulpw 2y ago
        Not yet, but the the human population has more than doubled since 1970, while the number of other vertebrates has halved. It's like biomass is conserved, and human growth (both in number and in waistlines) is us systematically converting biomass into ourselves. In 100 more years when the only vertebrates that aren't extinct or endangered are humans and our livestock and pets, will that be Grey Goo-like enough for you? Or does it only count if we manage to exterminate the insects and lower-order species too? Because an "unstoppable apex predator" could never become 100% Grey Goo, as it still needs something to eat! https://xkcd.com/1338/ https://xkcd.com/1338/
        undersuit 2y ago
        >Because an "unstoppable apex predator" could never become 100% Grey Goo, as it still needs something to eat! Grey Goo doesn't consume for energy but for mass; energy needs are plot devices. I'd argue the majority of human food consumption is for energy not mass so we can't approach the 100% mass of a grey goo event.
        lanstin 2y ago
        We are the grey goo! Excellent idea.
      - Retric 2y ago
jerf 2y ago
You can see a real-world of this in a very common building material, "wood". There's entire sub-ecosystems dedicated to breaking this material down... yet you can safely use it to build structures that can stand for a long time, dozens or even hundreds of times longer than the breakdown time of the material in the wild, without the wood breaking down, as long as you maintain the structure, which mostly involves keeping the wood dry. These entire subecosystems for breaking down wood have fundamental chemical and energetic prerequisites in order to do their work, they are not just ambiently and actively roaming the Earth seeking out that which they may devour and actively creating the circumstances they can do it in. So I'm not worried about bacteria learning how to break plastic down in the middle of the ocean getting released into the grocery store one day and in mere hours the entire store is spoiled and destroyed. It would really just become another engineering consideration for materials that already have a lot of such considerations.

sva_ 2y ago

What if you live in a humid, warm, tropical environment?

bell-cot 2y ago
Do things which old-fashioned fungi can break down, given time and water - physical books, wood furniture, natural fiber clothing - need any special treatments to survive in your environment? Figure that these plastic-rotting fungi won't be all that much different from the ones you're familiar with. This is not some SciFi "and the Nanotech Gray Goo ate the entire earth in a week" story.
- bregma 2y ago
  > This is not some SciFi "and the Nanotech Gray Goo ate the entire earth in a week" story. Not yet.
  - bell-cot 2y ago
    "Life Finds a Way, Inc." has had a planet-sized laboratory, running its Natural Mutation Engine 24x7x365, for a billion-ish years now. But no Gray Goo has actually evolved, and taken over the Earth. Perhaps, "Gray Goo" is just another cool-sounding trope, and not a real-world possibility?
    - immibis 2y ago
      Grey Goo has evolved in many incarnations. First was "unicellular life" edition. Most recently the planet has been taken over by "humans".
      - jerf 2y ago
        Part of the Grey Goo memeset is that the goo is an unstoppable apex predator that doesn't just tweak the ecological balance a bit in a conventional ecological relationship, but permanently establishes an ecological balance of 100% Grey Goo. This has not happened, not even "humans".
        saulpw 2y ago
        Not yet, but the the human population has more than doubled since 1970, while the number of other vertebrates has halved. It's like biomass is conserved, and human growth (both in number and in waistlines) is us systematically converting biomass into ourselves. In 100 more years when the only vertebrates that aren't extinct or endangered are humans and our livestock and pets, will that be Grey Goo-like enough for you? Or does it only count if we manage to exterminate the insects and lower-order species too? Because an "unstoppable apex predator" could never become 100% Grey Goo, as it still needs something to eat! https://xkcd.com/1338/ https://xkcd.com/1338/
        undersuit 2y ago
        >Because an "unstoppable apex predator" could never become 100% Grey Goo, as it still needs something to eat! Grey Goo doesn't consume for energy but for mass; energy needs are plot devices. I'd argue the majority of human food consumption is for energy not mass so we can't approach the 100% mass of a grey goo event.
      - lanstin 2y ago
        We are the grey goo! Excellent idea.
    - Retric 2y ago

jerf 2y ago

You can see a real-world of this in a very common building material, "wood". There's entire sub-ecosystems dedicated to breaking this material down... yet you can safely use it to build structures that can stand for a long time, dozens or even hundreds of times longer than the breakdown time of the material in the wild, without the wood breaking down, as long as you maintain the structure, which mostly involves keeping the wood dry. These entire subecosystems for breaking down wood have fundamental chemical and energetic prerequisites in order to do their work, they are not just ambiently and actively roaming the Earth seeking out that which they may devour and actively creating the circumstances they can do it in. So I'm not worried about bacteria learning how to break plastic down in the middle of the ocean getting released into the grocery store one day and in mere hours the entire store is spoiled and destroyed. It would really just become another engineering consideration for materials that already have a lot of such considerations.