The ones I remember reading about all come with a big caveat: The organisms can only work after the waste has been through some capital and energy intensive pre-treatment, like thermal depolymerization, which makes the economics unworkable for recycling.
Maybe one day we can do the heat treatment with direct solar energy.
This kind of thing always have a long trail of “almosts” before a breakthrough makes it viable outside of the lab. Every attempt makes us closer to it.
I mean, aren’t most of these “scientists find microbe that eats plastic” stories just them finding something in the wild that already has such an adaptation, rather than engineering something new? The idea that a plastic eating organism makes plastic nonviable to use anymore is a bit like saying that we can’t make stuff out of wood, paper, natural fibers like cotton or wool, etc, because those things will degrade given the right circumstances and time.
Not really apocalyptic per-se. The nightmare scenario would be that plastic would start bio-degrading similar to wood products and become far less viable as a material for long-term use containers. Yeah, it would require a massive shift in how we store things, esp. highly reactive chemicals, but it’d hardly be apocalyptic.
For the last 16 years there has been some kind of organism that could break down plastic. Never seems to go anywhere.
The ones I remember reading about all come with a big caveat: The organisms can only work after the waste has been through some capital and energy intensive pre-treatment, like thermal depolymerization, which makes the economics unworkable for recycling.
Maybe one day we can do the heat treatment with direct solar energy.
This kind of thing always have a long trail of “almosts” before a breakthrough makes it viable outside of the lab. Every attempt makes us closer to it.
I once saw a comment saying that a bacteria that consumes plastic could be apocalyptic if it got out of the lab and spread everywhere
I mean, aren’t most of these “scientists find microbe that eats plastic” stories just them finding something in the wild that already has such an adaptation, rather than engineering something new? The idea that a plastic eating organism makes plastic nonviable to use anymore is a bit like saying that we can’t make stuff out of wood, paper, natural fibers like cotton or wool, etc, because those things will degrade given the right circumstances and time.
Nah some are engineered too, as a possible way to recycle none-recyclables
The issue is usually they are woefully inefficient
Not really apocalyptic per-se. The nightmare scenario would be that plastic would start bio-degrading similar to wood products and become far less viable as a material for long-term use containers. Yeah, it would require a massive shift in how we store things, esp. highly reactive chemicals, but it’d hardly be apocalyptic.
The apocalypse of trash turning into cookies.
Cookie Clicker was right!
Not particularly, it really would only affect capitalist pigdogs, everyone else would be fine