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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 IRLThose two dudes in the fenced off city led pretty great lives in The Last of Us. Everyone else suffered terribly though.
Step 6: Become a closeted prepper
That needs to be step 3 at the latest, otherwise you won’t be prepared in time for step 5.
also closeted gays, I guess?
I’ve seen this every year for a decade still not a thing
Plastic is also such an unspecific term. In regards to biodegradability there is no reason why PE, PP, PVC, PLA, PS and all the others should behave similiarly. Aside from some form of polymerization they are entirely different chemicals.
It would actually be scary to me if an organism evolves to rapidly eat all plastic. Imagine plastic rust… ugh, its just a terrifying idea. You think mantianing a car is difficult now, wait until you have to check the integrity of any “plastic” component
Wood didn’t rot in the carboniferous era. It used to build up in dense layers that became our modern coal veins.
At some point microorganisms evolved to exploit that vast resource. Now coal can no longer generate naturally and we have to keep wood structures dry or painted lest they be reclaimed by the Eafth.
I don’t know if there’s any reason it couldn’t happen to plastics. We’ve created the niche already, how long until something exploits it?
Rust is not caused by a living organism but fine. There’s another good solution: don’t use plastic. Also, we don’t need personal cars
Yeah it just destroy the purpose of plastic
Well there is a simple remedy, and it is the same like for rust. Keep it dry. All microbial live needs water just as much as larger liveforms. If it is dry it can’t spoil, even if there is microorganisms on it. They might be alive, but they’ll be in stasis without sufficent accessible water. accessibility is also important here. E.g. salty water or water with high amounts of sugar are not useful to most microorganisms.
We all know how easy it is to keep a car dry in the PNW.
Well it’s a similar thing with “A cure for Cancer”. A cure for WHICH cancer? There are dozens of them…
Quality research is slow my dude.
and sensationalist journalism of preliminary research is faster than light
Journalists breaking the law!
!of physics!<
The trick is that the mushroom would still rather eat literally anything else. So you’d have to gather a pile of only that specific plastic to break down, and now you have the initial problems of why we don’t recycle in the first place: 💰
Also because plastic recycling was always a lie, only some types and in Ideal conditions can be recycled
As with everything that sounds too good to be true… what’s the catch?
I see this every couple years (I think it’s the same). The fungus can only degrade very few plastic types, like Styrofoam.
So are we disappointed it’s not the perfect solution, so we don’t bother?
Sounds like we’re on the right track and someone can find a way to make money with this, or decide to dedicate their resources to it for society’s benefit.
We don’t bother because those few kinds of plastics aren’t the ones that are causing most of the polution
If something costs millions and only works in a limited space, at specific conditions, and recycles 0.2% of all plastics, why would anyone want to invest in it?
Because 0.2% of all plastics is still a lot of plastic.
Okay, so go out and pay millions of dollars yourself and do it. If you can’t, why do you expect anyone else to do that, with no hope of return, no hope of sustainability and such?
Because they should care about the future of the human race more than their current bank balance.
We’re doomed as a species.
Then again - go out, sell your house and do it. It’s great to be outraged when “nobody is doing it”. Yet everything requires money to do. I have a company producing humanitarian supplies. Do you think I would be able to do it / should I do it for free?
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It isn’t absolute bullshit, it’s in the interest of a country. We have private scrapyards, recyclers and landfills that do that over here and they keep on going. It’s simply because this specific idea is so out of place, so hard to implement and just has “techbro” written all over it. It’s impractical and useless, yet it sounds cool to people who don’t know a thing about recycling.
I think I deleted that message because I was being bullshit. Sorry.
We already have the perfect solution. Stop producing plastic. But we sure as hell are not bothering with that either.
Its no exaggeration to say plastic is essential to modern society
I’m not sure why you are projecting disappointment on others. Best of luck mate
Fantastic. Styrofoam is not recyclable like Polypropylene or even the Polyethylenes. Styrofoam ends up in landfills. I want it in mushrooms.
It’s not the magic bullet but it’s a fucking howitzer. Yas kween.
Styrofoam is technically recyclable, it’s just that there are very few facilities that handle it.
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You’re doing good thing, thank you
Thank you, but the better thing I did was to kick Amazon to the curb and lessened needless purchasing. Thus I have much less packing materials to recycle. That’s the real win for me.
Lots of Styrofoam out there we need to get rid of
No my styrofoam monument I was hoping it would last forever
I mean tbh that seems like a pretty good start 🤷🏻♂️ styrofoam is a very common type of plastic produced in huge quantities…
From other times something like this came up:
- The rate of conversion is too low
- It will only eat plastic if other carbon sources aren’t available
Probably more, this is from the top of my head. Also, this will still cause the plastic to eventually be converted into CO2 which is released in the atmosphere.
Having it actually break down into CO2, water and a few other things would be way better than it permanently contaminating our food, water and ecosystems.
I agree, and it will probably break down anyway giving enough time. But it would be even better to take it out of the environment completely. The best would be not to even produce it for trivial stuff, so it doesn’t get to pollute the environment.
While it would be great to phase them out, we have to work with the world we have. One that wont switch off plastic production overnight and one that is already thoroughly contaminated. Something is going to be needed to break down what is already out there and minimize the damage of what continues to be produced.
You get a similar result by burning it for electricity and that removes coal/gas from the grid.
Youre not burning microplastics dispersed through water as fuel.
Do you want to worry about plastic rotting like wood does?
Yes. That’d be way better than having it kill animals and contaminate our food and water to the point where you basically cant avoid it. We literally want plastic to biodegrade. Just as long as it biodegrades after we are done using it. Which would be a wonderful problem to have compared to the current state of things.
While edible the mushroom tasted like garbage.
Well, everytime I see an article saying “we’ve found a [mushroom | bacteria | whatever] that eats plastic, yay!”, I always think: well, yeah, that’s great, but what about all the plastic we don’t want eaten just yet?
keep those away from the mushroom?
Anti-fungal cream, baby!
The amount of micro-plastics in everyone’s blood - even in tiny remote villages that have had next to no contact with the outside world - might make human beings look like an attractive meal to them? Surely nothing bad could happen if instead of micro-plastics we all have fungus in our blood?
Human beings already look like an attractive meal to all kinds of bacteria and virus
Yeah, that’s what our immune system is for.
There are hundreds of different plastics, each chemically different and created for different conditions. At least with heavy metal detoxification, fungi also tend to bioconcentrate what they eat. You can’t eat them growing off a hemlock tree without being poisoned by hemlock. Something will eat these and probably get a belly full of petroleum byproducts or whatever it metabolises that into.
My prediction: Edible mushrooms are gonna turn out to be not that edible when they’re grown on plastics.
That’s nice and all but these are fungi release CO2 into the atmosphere just like burning it would. It’s a bit counter-intuitive but burning it with carbon capture is less CO2 emitting.
Filtering out particles is obvious requirement and easier than filtering CO2. This is all a worse solution than to simply use less plastic. Taxing plastic out of existence is the real solution.
Preach.
Everyone wants a silver bullet to the problem. The silver bullet begins and ends with a corporate pocketbook.
Maybe we can silver bullet a few executive conspirators too?
But the plastic already is captured carbon. Burning it and then capturing it again makes no sense at all.
If you want to avoid the micro plastic, store it better, that’s still much cheaper.
Right next to the nuclear waste, I guess?
ironically nuclear waste is way safer, because we have extremely strict standards for handling it.
also most nuclear waste is just irradiated tools and clothing
Taxing wasteful uses and protecting life saving uses (sanitization, hospitals, etc). Is the only solution. Treat every other approach as distractions by people who want to profit from the way things are.
Plastic is one of the greatest inventions of all time. But just like nuclear energy, it’s also the most deadly to us if we are stupid.
Don’t even ask. Just start releasing that shit.
Do you want The Last of Us? Because this is how you get The Last of Us.
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.
Man, Vincent and Jules were some really fun guys.
Now we need one that converts carbon dioxide to something that can be put away forever…
Certain rocks/minerals will do this. But there is no financial driver today to do it.
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.
you eat fungus spores every single day nonstop. They are everywhere. Just cause this one eats plastic why would the spores be dangerous? (also it probably only eats one type so like 5% of plastic)
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
This is really bugging me. The article claims the fungus is an edible mushroom, but Pestalotiopsis (the spores on the right) is an endophytic, microscopic ascomycete. Not a mushroom and certainly not edible. So why is there a picture of Pluteus on the left? I can only imagine the author googled “Pestalotiopsis mushroom” and grabbed the first picture that came up.
Can you eat the mushrooms later? Circle of life!
This article (https://www.treehugger.com/mushroom-that-eats-plastic-5121023) goes into more detail. There are at least three species. It’s from 2022, so there’s probably something more recent…
From July last year (https://www.shroomer.com/mycoremediation-plastic-eating-mushrooms/)
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.
