Nooo fuck this is stupid!
Plastic in landfills is sequestered carbon! Why release it into the atmosphere?
Breeding bacteria to eat plastic will make plastic less useful as a material. Plastic is awesome because it DOESN’T rot. If we do release plastic eating microorganisms that might change. Whatever environmentalist think, we use plastics for a reason.
What we need is:
- Create plastics without oil and from sustainable energy
- Recycle plastics (invent better plastics and recycling processes)
- Stop throwing plastic in the oceans
- bury plastic in landfill to sequester carbon
What exactly is solved by introducing plastic eating microorganisms into the ecosystem? If microplastics don’t deteriorate, they’ll eventually become like sand and all the other shit. I swear to God this is the stupidest thing since solar fricking roadways.
PS: If you absolutely don’t want to recycle or bury plastic you can also burn it in the right circumstances. Instead of feeding it to mushrooms and releasing CO2 and methane into the air you get heat and can capture the CO2.
PPS: Microplastics is a qustion of regulation. And garbage dumping into rivers (like most of the plastic in the oceans comes from a few rivers) is a problem of economic idiocy. Neoliberal Ideology is produced in the US and exported into developing countries. Loans and shit demand privatization of all sorts of services. Including garbage removal. The result? People dump trash in the rivers because muh socialism is bad. Plastic in the ocean is a problem with very simple non-technical solutions.
Would be great if mushrooms don’t burn the carbon and turned it into some other compound using energy(maybe something like fossil fuels)
I did see something about new methods through chemical processes to turn more plastics back into the feedstock. Search “plastic feedstock” or “circular feedstock” or something. It probably requires some chemicals and heat and pressure or something, but that could be powered by solar or wind. It’s just a question of economics (money), investments, and most likely planning.
But really, burning plastic isn’t “nice” but fundamentally there isn’t a big difference between some mineral rock buried below the earth or plastic. And with carbon sequestration it’s a net positive - at least once we stop using fossil fuels and switch to a circular economy.
Step 1: make everything from plastics
Step 2: create plastic eating fungus to get rid of the trash
Step 3: create serious damage to all parts of our society and technology, as plastic eating fungus spores get everywhere, including our food chain and your brain.
Theoretically if they don’t produce toxins as a byproduct of plastic metabolism, eating the plastics out of our brains could (in an idealized and highly unlikely case) be a good thing. If they don’t also eat organic matter they’ll starve out when the plastics are gone and our immune system could clean out the debris left behind
We have that. They’re called “plants.” If we just stop cutting down all the trees and poisoning the seas, plants will capture the carbon in the air and return it to the ground when they die. Or it will become part of the natural food chain.
So don’t worry, either we will stop destroying all of the ecosystems, or the plants can fix the planet after we’re all gone.
Well it’s going to happen one way or the other. The only question is whether humans will be there for it.
Cutting the trees down is fine (well the ones we plant for the purpose I mean) - turn them into books and then store the books. As an added benefit you get books!
Then conservatives get elected, burn all the books and we are back to where we started
I’m not a scientist by any stretch, but would disposing of plastics with these mushrooms in a terrarium of sorts help? They would have to be big and numerous.
The mushrooms would break down the plastics into CO2 and water and the plants would absorb the CO2 and water. As the plastics start to go away, we could add more of our excess plastic to keep the cycle going.
If this works, it also keeps the plastic eating mushrooms contained and away from all the essential plastics we have today.
I’ve always wondered how big an impact burying all grass clippings would have… I assume very little since I’ve never heard it mentioned before.
You would have to bury them really deep to prevent them from being converted fully back to CO2, or worse methane, by other organisms.
Don’t even ask. Just start releasing that shit.
Among a hundred other end of days scenarios.
Know what the difference between plastic and oil? (not just crude or motor, but cooking, lubricating, buttering?)
Let’s release a designer consumer that would require very little mutation to end humanity. Do it already.
Depending on your outlook this might just make the notion more enticing.
Step 1. Invent microplastics.
Step 2. Have people ingest microplastics into their bodies.
Step 3. Evolve plastic-eating mushrooms.
Step 4. ???
Step 5. The Last of Us IRL
Those two dudes in the fenced off city led pretty great lives in The Last of Us. Everyone else suffered terribly though.
