Comment by pinkmuffinere
3 months ago
This is fascinating! Is this on-net good or bad for humans? On one hand, bacteria that consume plastics can help clean up the mess humans have produced, keeping the world somewhat more balanced. On the other, plastics are very useful to humans, so if they start "rotting" away this could cause lots of problems for society.
My guess is that this is on-net good for humanity. Curious what more qualified folks think.
Plastic is a hydrocarbon. If bacteria can metabolize it, we have a whole new source of GHG on our hands. It looks like 5–10% of petroleum ends up as plastic, which seems like a decently sized new supply of GHG to worry about. Even if we switched entirely to renewables tomorrow, we'd still have 5–10% of all of our emissions ever just sitting there waiting to eventually be released by bacteria. (Over what time span, I have no idea.)
Plastic was easy mode. Whatever we come up with to replace it is going to make things shittier somehow. In the form of more expensive processing and probably more exotically produced (harmful to humans working the plant).
I wonder if we really will come up with a replacement at all. Even if the bacteria can digest plastics, I can imagine that it may take N years to fully degrade a 0.125" piece. If N is 10 years, then maybe we just accept that plastics become unusable after 10 years for most applications -- For most of the things I use, I think this would be fine. Plumbing would be a disaster though. But if N is 1 year then ya, I think we'll need something totally new.
Plastics as in "polymers made of small organic monomers" are sort of a universal solution. Nature uses them a lot as well. For the same reasons we do, too.