[HN Gopher] Bugs are evolving to eat plastic
___________________________________________________________________
Bugs are evolving to eat plastic
Author : gmays
Score : 231 points
Date : 2021-12-20 15:49 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nationalobserver.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nationalobserver.com)
| ricardo81 wrote:
| Bit of a Layman but it seems there's an economy in the biological
| pathways for processing plastic going by pieces I've read.
|
| The fascinating thing for me is that evolution has likely
| produced these variants many times over the past, but now the
| ecology supports their argument for natural selection.
| kypro wrote:
| I feel like I've been reading this story for well over a decade
| at this point. On one hand this is great news and I would think
| almost inevitable with enough time, but as layperson on this
| subject plastic eating microbes still fall into the category as
| nuclear fusion and anti-ageing medicine -- something just around
| the corner, but always a decade or so away.
|
| Is this actually an entirely new discovery in the sense that this
| was an unexpected find, or is this just another find of many
| showing the same trend? And what kind of time frames should I be
| expecting before plastics are considered biodegradable like other
| natural materials?
|
| I have to admit, the idea that plastic could become biodegradable
| in a few decades changes my perception of their use a little and
| I'm not sure this is a positive thing, especially if this is
| something that isn't likely to happen for a very long time.
| hackarimoo wrote:
| Biodegradable or not means much less than it sounds like, if
| micro- and nano- plastics still bioaccumulate in animals
| disrupting their endocrinology
| mlyle wrote:
| > Biodegradable or not means much less than it sounds like
|
| Long-term stability of plastics means that the problems from
| microplastics today could still be problems in a million
| years. It's worse than nuclear waste in that regard: at least
| the hottest isotopes degrade quickly and the less hot still
| halve on a predictable schedule. Currently, for a lot of
| plastics, all you've got removing them from circultion are UV
| degradation and weathering processes, along with processes
| burying them in sediments for unknown periods.
|
| But the microbial environment could at least confine this to
| be a very bad problem _for our time_ , instead of _forever_.
| hanniabu wrote:
| Companies will just create bacteria resistant plastic and
| continue to fuck us
| trulyme wrote:
| "and continue to provide what we want", you mean? It's
| not the companies that are the (sole) problem.
| soperj wrote:
| I don't know. For a while the major toothpaste companies
| were putting plastic beads in toothpaste as grit. I would
| say that's a company issue.
| heurisko wrote:
| It's the 21st century version of lead in makeup.
|
| I'm certain in 100-150 years it will be viewed in the
| same way.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorian-era_cosmetics
| freemint wrote:
| And nature (maybe with our hand) will catch up. It's
| playing cat and mouse with a mouse that stands still once
| the plastic is produced.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| It is with complete ignorance that I'm asking this, but isn't
| it the case that, at a molecular level, plastics are just
| like any other material? That they can be broken down to such
| a point that their molecular composition no longer matters,
| and they are, once again, "raw" molecules by which other
| things (even living things) can be composed? What does
| "accumulation" even mean in that context?
| ars wrote:
| Most plastics are just water and CO2 in various
| combinations. A few (PVC) have some chlorine, but the vast
| majority could be burned, or digested by a bacteria, and
| emit just water and CO2.
| mlyle wrote:
| Anything _can_ be broken down, but many things are
| effectively stable in the environment-- including in
| organisms-- for nearly forever, because nothing breaks them
| down or the rate of degradation is low enough that it doesn
| 't matter.
|
| What I believe he's saying is: even if it looks like
| bacteria may eventually begin to chip away at the
| microplastics problem, we still face the prospect of having
| them accumulate for decades or longer in bigger lifeforms
| and cause problems.
|
| (But at least today's plastic releases wouldn't be a
| problem _forever_ ).
|
| That is, this improves the situation greatly but doesn't
| remove any of the nearer term suck.
| pphysch wrote:
| How are plastics different than other un-metabolizeable
| (?) substances (dirt) that organisms have been
| accidentally ingesting since time immemorial?
|
| Some are probably toxic, but so are naturally occurring
| heavy metals, etc.
| ars wrote:
| > we still face the prospect of having them accumulate
| for decades or longer in bigger lifeforms and cause
| problems.
|
| That's not really accurate - if an organism can breakdown
| (digest) plastic to any extent, it can do so all the way
| to water and CO2.
|
| There are a few exceptions: Teflon and PVC are the main
| ones, but most plastic is pretty simple, and once
| digested it will not accumulate.
| mlyle wrote:
| > That's not really accurate - if an organism can
| breakdown (digest) plastic to any extent, it can do so
| all the way to water and CO2.
|
| I can't breakdown most plastic to any significant extent.
|
| If I ate small pieces of plastic, some would be excreted
| in poop and some would accumulate in my body.
|
| If I ate animals that have eaten small pieces of plastic,
| being high up the foodchain, this may be exacerbated
| (biomagnification).
|
| If bacteria learn to degrade plastic--- that may improve
| the situation for my grandchildren but it probably
| doesn't reduce how much is accumulating in marine life
| now that much.
| soperj wrote:
| that's entirely dependent on whether the bacteria can
| exist within the gut of the aforementioned marine life.
| If they're eating plastic, and ingest that bacteria, and
| it starts to act on all of the plastic that's been stuck
| in their system for years, that would improve the
| situation.
| mlyle wrote:
| > If they're eating plastic, and ingest that bacteria,
| and it starts to act on all of the plastic that's been
| stuck in their system for years, that would improve the
| situation.
|
| That's a lot of ifs. Right now significant biodegradation
| of plastic by marine bacteria is still pretty unlikely.
| Further presuming that the bacteria capable of this will
| also evolve to exist within the gut of higher marine line
| is a bit of a leap: guts are a pretty harsh competitive
| environment and "random" bacteria you ingest don't go
| live there. And, it further presumes that all the
| accumulated plastic resides within the gut (it doesn't).
| soperj wrote:
| >And, it further presumes that all the accumulated
| plastic resides within the gut (it doesn't)
|
| Where does it reside?
| mlyle wrote:
| Once the pieces get small, they tend to migrate and
| accumulate throughout an organism. e.g. https://www.acs.o
| rg/content/acs/en/pressroom/newsreleases/20...
|
| No one really knows what the impact of this is. Maybe
| it's not too bad. Maybe it is.
| ars wrote:
| > I can't breakdown most plastic to any significant
| extent.
|
| Actually you can't break down plastic _at all_. You can
| just grind it with your teeth.
|
| > If bacteria learn to degrade plastic--- that may
| improve the situation for my grandchildren but it
| probably doesn't reduce how much is accumulating in
| marine life now that much.
|
| This is where your mistake lies - if you can degrade
| plastic _at all_ , then you can degrade it all the way to
| water and CO2. There is no partial degrading here, you
| either can, or you can't.
|
| (Note: I am speaking of degrading plastic for its energy
| content, which is what bacteria would do. Mechanically
| breaking plastic into small pieces is not the same thing.
| Nor is de-polymerizing the plastic.)
| smsm42 wrote:
| Bacteria can do pretty much any chemistry that's within
| their energy reach. E.g. making sugars out of plastics.
| Or ethanol. Or anything else. There's no law that says it
| has to be all water and co2. I see no argument why it
| can't be partial - enzymes do partial degrading alk the
| time.
| politician wrote:
| On long enough time scales, the all of the plastic on
| Earth will be incinerated, regardless of whether microbes
| evolve to make use of it sooner.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Single celled organisms don't have endocrine systems, if they
| are able to break plastics down and metabolize them, then
| that's the end of those big thorny molecules.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Biodegrade does not mean "chew up into tiny pieces" it means
| chemically break down. Biodegraded plastic would end up being
| much simpler molecules, probably CO2 and methane mostly.
| rubyn00bie wrote:
| This video I recently watched, and was well recently made, from
| Anton Petrov, covers some novel new techniques to create self
| reproducing cells which might actually be a great candidate for
| cleaning our oceans. It's at least a _lot_ closer than I ever
| imagined it would be:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnivFz2rbM4
| ShrigmaMale wrote:
| Feels like nobody considers that these could make plastic much
| less durable. If we create them they should be unable to
| survive at all outside extremely specific conditions so they
| can't spread.
| baxtr wrote:
| Why is this not a problem with wood? We have learned how to
| protect wood from microbes. We will learn the same thing for
| plastic as well.
| dahfizz wrote:
| FWIW, we avoid this problem with wood by pressure treating
| the wood with poisonous chemicals, so mold and other
| organisms can eat it.
|
| Another common method is to protect the wood with a layer
| of plastic (polyurethane, paint, etc). That's evidently out
| the window...
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| I thought the way we prevent wood rot is keeping moisture
| away, painting it is one way to prevent moisture away
| dahfizz wrote:
| That is a common technique I mentioned. Most paints and
| finishes we use on wood are in the plastics family. So if
| microbes can eat plastics, that line of defense becomes a
| lot weaker.
|
| The other way we protect wood is to acknowledge that it
| will get damp, and pressure treat it with poison so that
| mold can't grow on it.
| grumple wrote:
| It took a long time for fungi to evolve to consume wood
| (bacteria too). It took 60 million years for this evolution
| to take place. Sounds like plastic might be on a faster
| track according to this article.
|
| Basically wood cells are hard to penetrate, don't provide a
| food source if they've been air dried, and even in cases
| where fresh cut wood isn't dried quickly, organisms don't
| cause enough damage to affect wood's strength. Pretty
| fascinating stuff.
|
| > Deterioration Without Decomposition. When fresh-cut
| lumber or veneer is properly air-seasoned, the stored food
| materials in the sapwood are soon depleted by the
| respiratory processes of the wood parenchyma cells
| themselves. If drying is delayed, however, the fresh-cut
| wood can be invaded by so-called sap-stain fungi and algae,
| or by bacteria and molds that develop over the surface or
| penetrate deep into the sapwood by growing through the ray
| cells from one wood storage cell to another. These
| organisms use the contents of the wood storage cells as
| food and thus do not affect the strength of wood seriously;
| they primarily discolor the wood or alter its permeability.
| When fresh-cut wood is kiln-dried immediately, the living
| cells of the sapwood are killed by the heat and the reserve
| foods are retained in the wood storage cells. If kiln-dried
| wood becomes wet again, these stored foods can again become
| substrates for growth of discoloring fungi and bacteria.
|
| Source:
| https://www.fpl.fs.fed.us/documnts/pdf1984/kirk84a.pdf
| pishpash wrote:
| "These organisms use the contents of the wood storage
| cells as food and thus do not affect the strength of wood
| seriously; they primarily discolor the wood or alter its
| permeability."
|
| Discoloration only? But then what is rot?
| bcbrown wrote:
| The linked text is titled "Biological Decomposition of
| Solid Wood". It's pretty fascinating, and also covers
| destructive decomposition mechanisms.
| MayeulC wrote:
| Oh, they will certainly evolve to eat plastic by themselves
| at some point. Some already do.
|
| During carboniferous, microbes couldn't eat lignin from wood.
| Now we have fungi and all sorts of bacteria (including those
| termites host) that can make use of it.
| thrashh wrote:
| Every time I rake leaves or clean up after my plants, I
| think of the sheer amount of trash that plants create, from
| discarded leaves to flower petals. We're fine with it of
| course because something figured out how to eat the trash.
| MayeulC wrote:
| I think that's a key point: you need to leave _enough_
| trash that it 's evolutionary interesting to make use of
| that resource. It needs to provide a competitive
| advantage. Not sure we're here yet, though some
| environments like dumps could cross that threshold.
|
| Oh, and time. Life is more diverse now than it was during
| carboniferous, but it still took millions of years for
| bacteria to learn how to digest lignin/wood.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| carboniferous, that period didn't have CRISPR. We could
| give that evolutionary path a little push along if we
| like.
| smsm42 wrote:
| I'd rather we didn't mess with that stuff. You can't
| uncreate a microorganism, we have no realistic way of
| controlling them (see under MRSA) and our world is made
| of plastic. I'd rather not have it fall apart because
| some lab assistant made an oopsie.
| MayeulC wrote:
| Sure, that's something to consider before releasing stuff
| like this in the wild, especially if it can mutate and
| start attacking something else.
|
| My point was: whether we use GMO or not, such a thing
| might happen naturally.
|
| There is also a chance that such a mutation does not
| offer much competitive advantage if other nutrients are
| easy to find, and the mutation disappears. I wouldn't bet
| on it though, given the number of ecological niches that
| exist.
| Heliga wrote:
| Instead of the grey goo apocalypse everyone worried about
| with nanites, we'll have a green apocalypse.
| [deleted]
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| To me this sounds like easy cynicism. Is it really your
| expectation that evolution happens on the same time scale as
| Latest Software 2.0?
| rhacker wrote:
| I'm also still waiting for my shipment of 90% efficient solar
| panels.
| philipkglass wrote:
| _In the extreme limit, for a multi-junction solar cell with
| an infinite number of layers, the efficiency limit is 68.7%
| for normal sunlight, or 86.8% using concentrated sunlight._
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shockley%E2%80%93Queisser_limi.
| ..
|
| There will never be a shipment of 90% efficient solar panels.
| Unlike fusion, nobody has even predicted that 90% efficient
| solar panels might be available in a decade.
|
| If this is just a hyperbolic way of saying that people
| predict more efficient solar panels all the time -- well, yes
| they do. Many of those panels actually make it to market. The
| first terrestrial solar panel to reach 20% efficiency was
| introduced in 2012:
|
| https://newsroom.sunpower.com/press-releases?item=122881
|
| Today, a half dozen manufacturers offer modules over 20%
| efficiency. And the newer entrants are all doing it with
| simpler and more affordable cell designs than SunPower used
| in 2012.
| jdmichal wrote:
| Considering that black-body absorbers for water heating run
| around 75%, you might be waiting for a while?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_water_heating#Energy_pro.
| ..
| [deleted]
| scrooched_moose wrote:
| It's a mixed bag and I'm not sure which side wins out.
|
| On one hand, cleaning up plastic pollution is a fantastic
| thing. On the other, there is a tremendous amount of carbon
| currently locked up in plastics which is for all practical
| purposes inert. Releasing that into the atmosphere is yet one
| more thing that will accelerate climate change.
|
| It also will require a massive shift in our material usage.
| Bacteria breaking down that plastic bag in the ocean is great.
| Bacteria setting in on construction, medical devices, or your
| NES is not so ideal.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > there is a tremendous amount of carbon currently locked up
| in plastics which is for all practical purposes inert
|
| https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-
| produc...
|
| 1.6% of petroleum products consumed in the US went to
| petrochemical feedstocks (which I'll take to be mostly
| plastic). _Far_ more petroleum is just burned, and this doesn
| 't even count coal. In terns of CO2, plastics are almost
| negligible.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Yeah, it is kind of funny that plastic crap we make functions
| as a decent long-term carbon sink. Stable, resistant to
| degradationIf only we could properly bury it without it
| getting everywhere, including in our internal organs.
|
| I have apocalyptic dreams of plastic-eating plagues swarming
| our civilization out of nowhere.
| asow92 wrote:
| > It also will require a massive shift in our material usage.
| Bacteria breaking down that plastic bag in the ocean is
| great. Bacteria setting in on construction, medical devices,
| or your NES is not so ideal.
|
| That's a great point, and one that may make material planners
| think twice about using plastics over other materials like
| metals, woods, or plasters in their projects.
| pharke wrote:
| The scary one is medical devices. Plastics were a godsend,
| enabling the mass production of disposable medical
| equipment that effectively solved a lot of tricky
| sterilization problems. There are a lot of other things
| that plastics are the best option for, we would suffer a
| fairly major technological set back if we were suddenly
| faced with a plague of plastic eating microbes.
| louky wrote:
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2368220.Mutant_59
| tlholaday wrote:
| Kit Pedler & Gerry Davis overwrite compellingly, if the
| Goodreads excerpt is representative.
| outworlder wrote:
| > over other materials like (...) woods,
|
| Plenty of bugs eat wood. From fungi to termites. And yet we
| can still use wood for construction.
| asow92 wrote:
| Some woods like cedar are more resistant. Some kinds of
| ash are more or less susceptible to beetle damage. It all
| depends of the application and environment, just like
| plastics might in this scenario.
| p1mrx wrote:
| If these ideas interest you, check out Andy Weir's book
| _Project Hail Mary_. I can 't clarify why without spoilers.
| arcastroe wrote:
| For those of us interested in the spoiler, could you tell
| us behind a link? (perhaps pastebin.com)
| p1mrx wrote:
| Spoiler: https://pastebin.com/Vk8T0rSB
| nitrogen wrote:
| There's also a link to a plot element of _The Andromeda
| Strain_ by Crichton.
| shkkmo wrote:
| Having read that book fairly recently, I only see a weak
| link at best. It is worty a read though.
| bena wrote:
| When I saw bugs, I thought "that's new". But apparently it's
| just bacteria, which is old news.
|
| Or, as you put it, another find showing the same trend.
|
| I think it would be difficult to pinpoint how long it will take
| for plastic to become biodegradable. Evolution is a sporadic
| process.
| snarf21 wrote:
| I don't know enough about this subject but does anyone know if
| this bacteria is harmful to humans? Like could it eat the
| micro-plastics in our water and food and still be safe if we
| later ingested it?
| saalweachter wrote:
| The real answer is "no one knows", but my intuition would be
| that you wouldn't expect them to be particularly harmful.
|
| One of the advantages of consuming a novel food source like
| plastic is a relative lack of competition; this means you
| wouldn't expect there to be a lot of benefit for producing
| toxins to kill off competitors for your foodstuff.
|
| (For an analogous case, the microorganisms that can grow on
| maple syrup don't tend to produce toxins; there's not much of
| a need when their food will kill most bacteria.)
| amelius wrote:
| > something just around the corner, but always a decade or so
| away.
|
| Is there a word for it?
| thenanyu wrote:
| vaporware
| dustymcp wrote:
| Soon TM
| defterGoose wrote:
| Neventual?
| neltnerb wrote:
| It is possible someone is trying to develop these commercially
| (likely, I'd guess) but if they're just observing natural
| mutation and reporting it I'm not sure there needs to be a
| timeline.
|
| They have evolved, but there aren't a ton of them yet. It's not
| very surprising to me that this happened. Just consider how
| many times covid has mutated and then extrapolate out to how
| much genetic diversity is likely in play.
|
| I do think if it were being done by humans in a lab
| intentionally even directed evolution would work this out in a
| few years. In the environment they're competing against other
| microbes that eat sugars and other easier to grow on stuff so
| I'd expect these to be a niche species.
| cryptica wrote:
| Reminds me of the George Carlin quote: "The air and the water
| will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it's true that
| plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply
| incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic.
| The earth doesn't share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic
| came out of the earth."
| theincredulousk wrote:
| Every time I see one of these articles, I can't help but think of
| some bacteria evolving or escaping a lab that works a bit _too_
| well and ends up destroying the modern world
| jsymolon wrote:
| ala, "Ringworld" by Larry Niven, in which,
|
| City Builder rule ended after the Ringworld was infected with a
| superconductor eating bacteria in a plot by the Puppeteers
|
| https://larryniven.fandom.com/wiki/City_Builders
| rglover wrote:
| > "We found multiple lines of evidence supporting the fact that
| the global microbiome's plastic-degrading potential correlates
| strongly with measurements of environmental plastic pollution --
| a significant demonstration of how the environment is responding
| to the pressures we are placing on it," said Prof. Aleksej
| Zelezniak of Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden.
|
| > Jan Zrimec, also at Chalmers, said: "We did not expect to find
| such a large number of enzymes across so many different microbes
| and environmental habitats. This is a surprising discovery that
| really illustrates the scale of the issue."
|
| > The first bug that eats plastic was discovered in a Japanese
| waste dump in 2016. Scientists then tweaked it in 2018 to try to
| learn more about how it evolved, but inadvertently created an
| enzyme that was even better at breaking down plastic bottles.
| Further tweaks in 2020 increased the speed of degradation
| sixfold.
|
| This is why I believe in God. The absolute "holy crap" of the
| system quietly upgrading itself to handle whatever we throw at
| it. As an engineer that's incredibly humbling.
| rocgf wrote:
| Using evolution as proof of God's existence is something I find
| truly intriguing.
| rglover wrote:
| It's a rabbit hole, for sure. The way I came to this point of
| view is through programming and the intentionality of it all.
| Evolution is just an algorithm. Based on what we know about
| the world, something or someone had to write that algorithm.
| I've burned some serious cycles thinking about this and
| always end up laughing at how little we know.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| It begs the question: who created evolution? (I'm not saying
| "God"; just asking a question).
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Evolution is a name humanity has given a process. It makes
| no sense to ask "who created evolution".
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Change the question then: "who or what created the
| process or the laws that define the process?" I'm not
| providing an answer, but am wondering about your answer.
| tsian2 wrote:
| Isn't it an inevitable process considering how life works
| on this planet? I suppose you could say that life creates
| it, in the same way that you could say drivers create
| traffic patterns.
| soperj wrote:
| If it was God, it would beg the question, who created God?
| rglover wrote:
| Yes. And this is why I think humans are overly-hubristic
| in their thinking. It excites the hell out of me that _we
| just don 't know_.
| soperj wrote:
| No. Even the things we do know you've just said aren't
| explainable by anything but God in this thread.
| rglover wrote:
| In effect, yes, but that's an oversimplification. This is
| a multi-hour/day/week/month/year conversation.
| soperj wrote:
| Not really. Humans created God. The end.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| While we might dismiss human notions of a god,
| independent of humans, there still are cosmological
| details to the universe that do not have tidy answers.
| There is no reason to believe that advances in the
| understanding of the creation of universe will actually
| explain existence, but only push back our knowledge such
| that we will remain unclear on the prior causes whatever
| we figure out.
|
| There is a profound "Turtles all the way down" problem
| even confined to fully rational discussion of the matter.
| rocgf wrote:
| It really does not beg that question at all.
|
| You might as well say "well, if the sky is blue, then who
| invented the color blue?". Nobody, it's just a name we give
| to a random light wavelength.
| rglover wrote:
| Exactly. Evolution can't explain evolution.
| mod wrote:
| Perhaps it can.
|
| Put simply, (maybe) life that does not evolve gets out
| competed and dies out.
|
| I actually think that's the logical conclusion.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Yes, but how did the rules for evolution come about?
| gaganyaan wrote:
| Consider that your question is based on a
| misunderstanding. There aren't "rules" of evolution, it's
| just our label for part of what happens when you leave a
| bunch of hydrogen sitting around for an extended period
| of time. It's emergent behavior.
|
| You're driving at some sort of god thing, but that's
| actually unrelated. Sure, you can make the argument that
| the universe was created by something else, but however
| the universe got created, one bit of emergent behavior
| from it is the process of evolution.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| We can push the question further back.
|
| In the abstract, we can say that some form of evolution
| is going to occur whenever you have imperfect
| replication. That is the only criteria needed, and the
| "rules" emerge naturally such a start.
|
| You could ask, ok, why DNA based molecules and while not
| definitive, we have models around how their chemical
| precursors could become available in conditions similar
| to earths ancient past.
|
| You could ask why did earth have such conditions, and the
| answer is something like: many planets could have similar
| conditions, and given the size of the universe regardless
| of how common such conditions, one might expect them to
| arise like earth's somewhere.
|
| Ok, then you might ask what causes the universe have the
| types of stellar conditions and planetary formations and
| similar, to which we have cosmological models that
| generate these conditions from early energy states after
| the big bang.
|
| Ok, so then you ask what created the big bang, or the
| universe as whole? We don't have a great answer. But
| understanding how evolution itself comes to be doesn't
| require such a leap if we are will to accept an earlier
| starting point and start examining phenomenon from there.
| eeZah7Ux wrote:
| [citation needed]
| woodruffw wrote:
| The word "evolution" describes a process we've observed
| in systems with heritable characteristics and
| environmental pressures that more or less randomly select
| for or against those characteristics. It doesn't need a
| prime mover per se, because it's a statistical
| phenomenon.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| How did the laws or rules for that process come about?
| woodruffw wrote:
| The thing we call "science" is a loose collection of
| deductive, inductive, and abductive rules of inference,
| combined with empirical observation. A great deal of ink
| has been spent trying to determine the exact "laws" of
| science; Popper and Kuhn can probably help you with the
| details.
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| Religious fanatics have used this argument for the past
| few million things that have since been explained by
| science. Will likely do so for the next who knows how
| many years until everything is explained.
| rglover wrote:
| It's a valid argument (prepending "religious fanatics" to
| discredit it is intellectually weak). Science is nothing
| more than humans finding explanation for what was already
| created. The worship of it leads to an ignorance of the
| "why" and "who," putting an overemphasis on the what,
| where, when, and how.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Why? and who? are questions humans ask about their
| societies, families, and products. Assuming it applies to
| non-human natural phenomenon is quite intensely
| anthropomorphic and more than a little arrogant.
| rglover wrote:
| I shudder at the thought of your upbringing if curiosity
| is viewed as arrogance.
|
| I'm not assuming that it applies, those are just the best
| tools I have at my disposal for understanding right now.
| I patiently await the monolith that changes that
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHWs3c3YNs4).
| [deleted]
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| My upbringing was evangelical Christian... thus my
| distaste for theological supremacism.
| rglover wrote:
| Yeah, that will do it (I have a close friend in the same
| boat and understand the distaste). It's difficult, but
| I'd urge you to separate your views of God from that
| point of view.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Beh, I see it as a bonus having had that upbringing and
| moving on from it. Kind of like an immunization shot. I
| read a lot of theology and philosophy of religion,
| frankly, I'm quite religiously literate and my discipline
| in university was philosophy. But I'm an atheist, or
| maybe a scientific pantheist of some kind. There's no
| part of me that is against "asking questions", but part
| of inquiry is knowing which questions to ask.
| tkot wrote:
| Should we expect evolution to explain evolution, though?
| It reminds me a bit of the "falsifiability is not
| falsifiable" kind of argument - just like falsifiability
| doesn't apply to itself (it applies to science and
| falsifiability is a metascientific term), evolution is a
| biological term and doesn't apply to cosmogony.
| Maursault wrote:
| No it doesn't. Think for a moment about how absurd it is
| use the phrase "it begs the question" in this manner. _The
| statement is on it 's knees pleading for the question, "who
| created evolution?"_ That is what you are effectively
| claiming. Statements, whether true or false, can not drive
| cars, travel the world, raise a family, lose their jobs, be
| divorced, lose their home, and end up on the street with
| nothing, nor even _beg._
|
| Maybe it poses a question, maybe it raises a question, but
| it certainly does not _beg_ the question. Question begging,
| dating back to Aristotle (who personally coined the phrase)
| is an informal fallacy that means assuming the conclusion.
| I expect you may know it as a circular argument. A
| simplistic example may be, "this car goes fast because it
| is a fast car."
|
| The more you misuse language, the more you dilute the
| meaning of its words. Stop doing that, please. It's bad
| enough as it is with so many misunderstanding each other.
| Your cooperation is bagel. See? Now you have me doing it!
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| I'm sorry you focused on one verb in the sentence rather
| than the overall meaning of the sentence. You likely got
| my meaning but instead decided to focus not on the
| question but it's particular wording. I think that is
| called pedantic, but I'm hesitant to invoke a word that
| might upset you because of my misuse of it.
|
| I did not assume a conclusion when I asked that question.
| Maursault wrote:
| Your sincerity moves me, so I will absolve you of my
| focusing on what words mean. So much for accuracy and
| semantics, which, by the way, contrary to popular belief,
| is of vital importance to understanding what you are
| saying and it being understood by anyone else.
| jrockway wrote:
| Ultimately "who created X" can kind of go on forever. Who
| created evolution? The Universe. Who created the Universe?
| God. Who created God? Uh oh. If you decide that God is and
| always was, then you could say the same about the Universe
| itself.
|
| My current understanding leads me to believe that the
| Universe can't possibly exist. You can't create a Universe
| out of nothing. But here it is and here we are.
|
| I wouldn't think about it too much. It will make your head
| spin.
| woodruffw wrote:
| This general problem is called the "unmoved mover" in
| philosophy. Aristotle famously determined that there were
| a couple dozen unmoved movers, i.e. celestial spheres.
|
| Which begs the question: why limit ourselves to one guy
| in a robe when we can have a couple dozen of them pushing
| planets around?[1] :-)
|
| [1]: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus
| %3Atext%... and forward.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| It is an emergent phenomena of imperfect replication
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Why do you start from the question of something needing to
| be "created"? And why a "who"?
| BuildTheRobots wrote:
| As someone who had a very orthodox upbringing (though would
| now class myself as an agnostic geek), I find the disparity
| between religion and science to be baffling, especially the
| more fundemental beliefs.
|
| If I believe that God built the world, and I'm beholden to
| try and understand the will of God, then science is the only
| way of doing so. To believe that God clicked their fingers
| and willed everything into existence as it currently is,
| belittles the complexity of His/Her creation and belittles
| the deity too. I have no problem with science, evolution,
| biology etc - either it originated from entropy or it
| originated through design. What kicked everything off right
| at the start is almost a mute point - either way, we need to
| understand the systems that govorn the reality we're living
| in.
| kwere wrote:
| gotta update the marketing
| Waterluvian wrote:
| > of the system quietly upgrading itself to handle whatever we
| throw at it
|
| Not only is this dangerously wrong but it's an incredibly
| convenient perspective to enable someone to not deal with
| problems. Head in the sand.
|
| Magic man in the sky will hotfix our fuck ups. And if millions
| die, that was meant to be.
|
| In my opinion, this cripples an engineer's thinking.
| rglover wrote:
| That's not what I said. Calm down.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I copied and pasted your comment. Do you want to revise
| what you meant?
|
| I encourage you to elaborate on what you meant if I got it
| wrong.
| rglover wrote:
| Sure. Humans introduced something with a negative
| potential into the world (created out of things that were
| already in the world). Because of that negative
| potential, God (IMO, not a "man in the sky" but a form of
| positively-charged energy) introduced an organic solution
| as a starting point for humans to fix the problem. Then,
| scientists (following what I'd argue is a God-given
| impetus and capacity to do so) iterate on the discovery
| of the bugs to improve their efficiency.
|
| The central idea being that one of the great mysteries of
| life is that things tend to work out in one way another,
| despite all of our thrashing about. The
| mischaracterization of negative events being inherently
| "bad" (I view them as lessons or guidestones) ignores the
| inherent creative potential of those moments. Bugs
| evolving or coming into existence to compost the plastic
| is--as far as I see it--a tap on the shoulder saying
| "it's okay, try this."
|
| A very good encapsulation of this idea is from Carl Jung
| and is well-explained in this book:
| https://www.amazon.com/Jungs-Thoughts-God-Religious-
| Psyches/...
|
| This is a very deep topic and I'm happy to discuss over
| email: me@ryanglover.net.
| tkot wrote:
| What makes plastic something with a negative potential?
| Was lignin a "thing with negative potential" until some
| organisms capable of dissolving it appeared? What makes
| humans a separate thing from "God" - are they not a part
| of the same nature that created them (and lignin)?
|
| Don't get me wrong - plastic pollution is a serious
| issue. it just seems to me that the "negativity" of
| plastic pollution lies in making life more difficult for
| humans. Appearance of lignin surely influenced whatever
| forms of life existed at the time, we just don't care
| that much because we were not around (though carbon
| deposits from that time were surely useful as a source of
| easily accessible energy). We are born and we die in a
| world where lignin is biodegradable and not much of a
| hassle so we might be inclined not to call it "negative"
| even though it shares some similarities with plastics.
|
| Things sometimes play out in our favor (like the
| aforementioned coal deposits providing easily accessible
| energy) and sometimes they don't (like the CO2 from
| burning all this coal pushing the chemical composition of
| our atmosphere outside of favorable range of parameters).
| I don't really see any advantage of introducing
| additional beings into the description (I don't think it
| enables us to make more accurate predictions), though I
| guess it could be an interesting thought experiment along
| the lines of the Gaia hypothesis (or the Medea hypothesis
| for those of more pessimistic inclinations).
|
| I apologize if I made myself unclear or impolite - I
| tried my best to make this response as understandable as
| possible while trying to keep it reasonably short.
| rglover wrote:
| Not unclear or impolite at all. I appreciate the
| thoughtful response.
|
| > What makes plastic something with a negative potential?
|
| The human perception of it (bad aesthetics and
| contamination of water being the most concerning).
|
| > I don't really see any advantage of introducing
| additional beings
|
| I'm not positing God as a being nor a question of what's
| advantageous. It's an admission that we can't explain
| everything and the hole is God-shaped (again, IMO). We
| can observe quite a bit and form hypotheses/conclusions,
| but we can't go produce a perfect copy of Earth--we don't
| know how. Our best solution to a "backup Earth" at this
| point is to terraform Mars which is just manipulating an
| existing reality we didn't create. My general point
| being: something of superior intelligence had to produce
| the reality we're living in (irrespective of the form
| that intelligence takes).
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. This is a fascinating perspective for
| sure.
|
| I'm very guarded about the idea of "the system can
| correct to handle whatever we throw at it" because that
| makes it trivially easy to say "we don't need to worry
| because it'll sort itself out!" That's dangerous, in my
| opinion.
|
| God as "positively charged energy" piques my interest.
| Thanks for the link.
| rglover wrote:
| You did and then you editorialized a very ignorant
| interpretation of it.
| _joel wrote:
| Seems pretty accurate to me
| [deleted]
| datameta wrote:
| I can't avoid pointing out the glaring miscategorization of
| microbiota as insects in the title.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Surely you've heard disease causing agents referred to that way
| Sniffnoy wrote:
| Yes, but it's not the word's primary meaning. Using it in a
| headline like that -- where it's the first thing the reader
| sees, rather than after context has been established -- is
| misleading.
| waterhouse wrote:
| Very rarely (I'd heard the term "stomach bug"), and I would
| expect that to be slang--used by people who don't know
| whether the disease-causing agent is a virus, a bacterium, or
| something else (likely people who aren't very clear on the
| distinction between a virus and a bacterium). Does anyone who
| studies bacteria call them "bugs"?
|
| Edit: I tried googling "does anyone who studies bacteria call
| them bugs". The first relevant result is
| https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/bugs-
| within-u... , an article that contains: "You are full of
| bugs. No, not cockroaches and ants. These bugs are tiny,
| single-celled bacteria". The author is a "science
| journalist"... although, according to her resume, she does
| have a bachelor's degree in biology and studied something to
| do with an immune response gene, and worked on genetics and
| software for a few years. The second relevant result is
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/microbiome-
| survey... , whose author is also a "science journalist"...
| who majored in English and then went to a journalism school.
|
| That's more than I expected to find, though still not
| examples of someone who actively studies bacteria referring
| to them as bugs.
| bee_rider wrote:
| This post seems to indicate that it is colloquially used in
| the field:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29627747
|
| Although, I'd expect a science writer in the field to
| understand that the general public doesn't use this slang.
| ciphol wrote:
| My infectious diseases professor said of Ebola "that's a
| horrible bug". It seems to be standard slang in the field.
| ianmcgowan wrote:
| I have a friend who's a microbiologist and hanging out with
| him and his lab, "bug" is the preferred US slang term for
| any kind of microbe. In a more formal setting they'd be
| specific about the type of microbe. I don't think anyone is
| getting insects and microbes confused.
| DFHippie wrote:
| Eh, my mother has always spoken of stomach bugs and she's
| always known they weren't caused by insects. Her father was
| a botanist and her mother a geologist, so she grew up in
| closed proximity to people who spent a lot of time talking
| about the natural science. Likewise she knows that insect
| bugs aren't "true bugs" and that jellyfish and starfish are
| not jelly, fish, or stars.
| datameta wrote:
| Only in America, and it rubs me wrong each time. Regardless
| of my feelings on local dialect, this is the title of an
| article on scientific advancement. They shouldn't be
| taxonomically vague. It's misleading at best, clickbait at
| worst.
| Maursault wrote:
| Me too, actually. There is a subset of the population that
| insists on misusing language, and the effect is that the
| meaning of words becomes diluted, confusing, leading to
| misunderstandings and horrendous flame wars. It's just
| senseless.
|
| What I don't understand is how it is possible that bacteria
| could so rapidly evolve a microphone and radio transmitter.
| What evolutionary pressures could have caused that?
| selimthegrim wrote:
| https://www.cell.com/cancer-
| cell/pdf/S1535-6108(02)00133-2.p...
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| If you are going to be that picky then your original
| complaint was imprecise. Bug != insect. True bugs are
| hemiptera or possibly only heteroptera [1], bugs generally
| are any arthropods [2].
|
| It's surely not useful word if you wanted to be precise.
| The word bug _is_ taxonomically vague.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemiptera
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bug
| datameta wrote:
| "Insects are the largest group within the arthropod
| phylum" [0]
|
| So if colloquially any arthropod is a bug (which seems
| wrong to me) then any insect is a bug. To that end I can
| certainly agree that the word "bug" is a broad term and
| has different meanings contextually.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insect
| fouc wrote:
| You mean cooties?
| ByThyGrace wrote:
| I am afraid you are heavily misinterpreting. The article is
| obviously talking about off-by-one, out-of-bounds, use-after-
| free, and the rest of real world bugs.
| rdiddly wrote:
| I'm definitely doing my part to clean up the planet then!
| BrazzVuvuzela wrote:
| If you're speaking colloquially, earthworms are bugs but they
| aren't insects. If you're being pedantic, houseflies are
| insects but they aren't bugs.
| ironmagma wrote:
| I've also heard lobsters described as bugs, since they are
| crustaceans similar to woodlice.
| BrazzVuvuzela wrote:
| It's probably easier to list the invertebrates that aren't
| commonly called bugs than those that are. Squid, octopus
| and jellyfish get a pass. The immobile ones like corals and
| sponges as well, but I think that's about it.
| jimjimjim wrote:
| way way back in the day there was a Judge Dredd story about
| bacteria eating plastic used for infrastructure.
| jcadam wrote:
| Life, uh.. finds a way.
| Borrible wrote:
| No 'bugs' were harmed in this article.
|
| But is there a rise of the plastivors on the horizon?
|
| https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2020.011...
|
| Maybe, maybe not.
|
| https://www.bioplasticsmagazine.com/en/news/meldungen/202008...
| rdiddly wrote:
| So the plan is
|
| 1) first make tons of plastic
|
| 2) use the plastic lightly or once or until it breaks, and throw
| it away
|
| 3) bioengineer microbes to unmake the plastic
| createunderrate wrote:
| pelasaco wrote:
| maybe too early for such conclusion?
| Comevius wrote:
| This would not solve the microplastic pollution problem, which
| continues to be a health hazard. It's not likely that most of
| the biosphere can adapt. We certainly can't.
| acjohnson55 wrote:
| The planet hasn't dealt with the problem. This is good news at
| the first order, but it's clear that this is one more way that
| human activity may be dramatically impacting ecosystems. No one
| knows how this might affect food chains or chemical conditions.
| Organisms higher up in the food web are unlikely to evolve at
| the same pace and we could lose a lot of biodiversity and
| complexity that took dozens of millions of years to emerge.
| rough-sea wrote:
| https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mBio.02155-21
|
| Link to paper
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| "except for PP and PVC"
|
| https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mBio.02155-21
| rbartelme wrote:
| Running a Hidden Markov Model against shotgun metagenomic
| datasets != culturing microorganisms that can "do the thing".
|
| Link to actual journal article:
| https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mBio.02155-21
| 1_player wrote:
| The "bugs are eating plastic" articles are the new "scientists
| discover new breakthrough battery technology" clickbait articles
| that get posted every few months for the past three decades.
| drvdevd wrote:
| > "bugs"
|
| By which they mean bacteria. I was hoping they meant insects
| BrazzVuvuzela wrote:
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| Nom nom nom... delicious... Coca Cola bottle.
| waterhouse wrote:
| I _understood_ it to mean insects, and was confused that the
| article 's body talked about bacteria. Like, is this a usage
| of "bug" I'm not familiar with? Dictionary results talk
| specifically about insects (and about surveillance
| electronics)... Ok, Merriam-Webster's 3a here says it can
| refer to a microorganism of indeterminate nature:
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bug
|
| I still think an editor choosing the title should have
| realized that "insect" is the more common interpretation, and
| should have chosen a less misleading word.
| tomstuart wrote:
| "Bug" meaning "insect" is a North Americanism [0]. The
| article is from _The Guardian_ in the UK, where the non-
| insect meaning is the more natural interpretation,
| particularly in a headline (cf "hospital superbug" for
| stories about MRSA [1]).
|
| [0] https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/e
| nglis... [1] https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/mrsa/
| shkkmo wrote:
| But even that meaning applies it only to infectious
| diseases, not all bacteria.
| GordonS wrote:
| Brit here - context matters, so when I read this headline
| on HN, which is US-centric, I assumed it meant insects.
|
| But, even if I'd known it was on The Guardian, context
| still matters, and "bug" feels like an odd choice of word
| in a sentence like this, where "bacteria" would be more
| obvious - I have to assume they've chosen "bug" as
| clickbait. Which has me disappointed with them :/
| ros86 wrote:
| In the biotech field is indeed quite common to refer to
| microbes as bugs. Thanks for reminding that this is
| ambiguous outside the field!
| darkerside wrote:
| Sadly they probably did realize it and that's exactly why
| they ran it that way
| jmartrican wrote:
| Yeah but that's because they keep making incremental
| discoveries. This is just the next one.
| varelse wrote:
| And scientists just created a warp bubble, physicists are on the
| verge of cheap fusion, we cannot discount the possibility of a
| near-term AGI, and there's a cube shaped thing on the moon. Need
| I go on?
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Reminds me of Doomwatch: the Plastic Eaters
|
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0564476/
| verisimi wrote:
| Perhaps bugs have always been eating plastic?
|
| I occasionally have the chance to clear out attics etc. I do find
| old newspapers yellowed and more brittle, but old plastic bags
| also seem thinner and degraded. If they have been in the sun they
| literally turn to dust.
|
| I don't think they really do last for 1000's of years, as we were
| once told.
| outworlder wrote:
| They do though. Your degraded plastic bags have pieces that
| broke down. Some of those are microscopic. It will take a long
| time for those pieces to finally go away.
| verisimi wrote:
| I'm claiming from personal experience that they do break
| down.
|
| OTOH, you don't know how long they take to break down. How is
| it that a claim they will last thousands of years is accepted
| by you? Who can simulate thousands of years in a lab?
| FrameworkFred wrote:
| Sounds great to me. Why not manufacture plastics designed to
| degrade at increased rates in the presence of those enzymes? If
| turning plastics into compostables was easier, it might keep them
| out of the oceans.
| mimon wrote:
| They already manufacture a variety of biodegradable plastics.
| They are not more widely used because they have some
| combination of undesirable properties compared to common
| plastics (expensive, brittle, cannot be exposed to sunlight,
| moisture, etc.)
| batman-farts wrote:
| Preprocessing for recycling is a big concern too. When I
| still worked at the farmers market in San Francisco, I
| overheard one of the small-time sellers telling the staff
| that she couldn't take the compostable green Bio-Bags to
| Marin, only SF and Alameda County -- as Marin's waste
| disposal facilities apparently weren't equipped to shred them
| before composting.
|
| The dense compostable plastic cutlery must demand even more
| processing, and/or higher heat in the compost pile.
| Recology's compost piles outside of Dixon are absolutely
| massive, mid-size hills unto themselves. They must get pretty
| hot in the middle.
| baybal2 wrote:
| Microbes didn't know how to eat wood for tens of millions of
| years
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous
| chmod600 wrote:
| What's the difference in terms of energy reward? Might there be
| greater evokutionary pressure to digest plastic?
| fsflover wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29627412
| whalesalad wrote:
| But mycelium did!
| martibravo wrote:
| Nature is healing
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| Plot twist: so are humans
| docflabby wrote:
| This is actually more of a problem than it first sounds - a lot
| of the time plastic is used because it's not biodegradable,
| doesn't rot and is not attacked by bugs - its a wonder material
| in many ways - its why it's replaced wood in an lot of
| applications.
| js8 wrote:
| It reminds me of: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_Gobblers
|
| Funny short, it's on YT, but English version only incomplete.
| akhil-ghatiki wrote:
| jan34535345 wrote:
| At first this sounds interesting, than astonishing, than great,
| than maybe a little scary and in the end nature will eat plastic-
| teeth, car-interiours, undersea-internet-cables and clothes.
| Everyone naked without technology at last ;)
| dwighttk wrote:
| Yeah one of the things we like about plastic is that it isn't
| (very)biodegradable. Once we are done with it, sure we might be
| fine with it biodegrading, but not before.
| cletus wrote:
| I would love to go back in time, even just as an observer who
| couldn't modify the past. To be clear, I don't believe time
| travel is physically possible despite anyone's mental gymnastics
| with negative mass and/or energy. This is purely fanciful.
|
| I bring this up because this story reminds me of the history of
| trees. Nowadays, if you chop a tree down and leave it there
| within a year or two (depending on the size of the tree) it'll
| basically be gone, largely due to microbes that have evolved to
| consume mob. They're kind of wild to look at (there are Youtube
| videos).
|
| The ancestors of modern trees first appeared (IIRC) ~200-250M
| years ago. These apparently would've been odd to us. Small root
| systems that (apparently) were likely to topple over. But those
| microbes that now exist to consume wood didn't exist then and
| didn't exist for another ~60M years. This BTW is where 95% of the
| coal comes from.
|
| But what must this world have been like? Did tree trunks
| literally just lie there for tens of thousands of years until
| they probably were buried? Flowering plants didn't exist either.
|
| Anyway, I'm not sure what to make of microbes eating plastic. I
| mean is this a good thing? Obviously getting rid of nano-plastics
| would be good but what else would they do? My understanding is
| that the energy density of plastic is really high too. It's the
| same reason microbes don't eat concrete.
| pram wrote:
| I mean, fire still existed 200M years ago :V
| mjklin wrote:
| See submission and comments here for some good material :
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24459997
| divbzero wrote:
| We produce over 350 million tonnes of plastic each year [1]. If
| all of the plastic degraded would the carbon released
| significantly add to our greenhouse gas emissions?
|
| [1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/282732/global-
| production...
| titzer wrote:
| > 350 million tonnes
|
| That's more than the combined weight of all humans. Only about
| 18% of all worldwide plastic is recycled. That means that we
| literally are filling up the world with an entire copy of the
| worldwide population, in plastic, every year.
| divbzero wrote:
| That's a great way to put things in perspective: Have I
| consumed more than my weight in plastic this year?
| chewbacha wrote:
| My guess is yes, especially if the plastic was made from fossil
| fuels.
| divbzero wrote:
| Looks like it would add a single digit percentage to our
| global greenhouse gas emissions.
|
| For the most widely produced plastics we have: [2]
| Plastic Production (2015) 01
| PET (C10H8O4)n 63% C 33 Mt plastic 21 Mt C 02 PE-
| HD (C2H4)n 86% C 52 Mt plastic 45 Mt C 03 PVC
| (C2H3Cl)n 38% C 38 Mt plastic 14 Mt C 04 PE-LD
| (C2H4)n 86% C 64 Mt plastic 55 Mt C 05 PP
| (C3H6)n 86% C 68 Mt plastic 58 Mt C 06 PS
| (C8H8)n 92% C 25 Mt plastic 23 Mt C
|
| For greenhouse gas we have: [3] Greenhouse
| gas Emission (2019) Carbon dioxide
| CO2 27% C 57,000 Mt gas 15,000 Mt C
|
| Altogether we have about 200 Mt C in plastics vs. 15,000 Mt C
| in greenhouse gas emissions.
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic#Commodity_plastics
|
| [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas_emissions#M
| easu...
| jan34535345 wrote:
| At first this sounds interesting, than astonishing, than great,
| than maybe a little scary and in the end nature will eat plastic-
| teeth, car-interiors, undersea-internet-cables and clothes.
| Everyone naked without technology at last ;)
| humanwhosits wrote:
| Any risk of the bugs eating the plastics that are still in use?
| freemint wrote:
| Yes but not yet.
| fredley wrote:
| How long before plastic rots/degrades like wood or other
| materials?
| milesward wrote:
| Good?
| jsiaajdsdaa wrote:
| Not everything that is made from plastic is bad, for example
| things that are made from waste plastic.
| thehappypm wrote:
| It took a VERY long time for wood to be digested, and there was
| way more of it around than plastic.
| ajuc wrote:
| And does the landfills buried before that point become coal and
| oil :)
| wintorez wrote:
| I read somewhere that 300 million years ago, when trees died,
| they didn't rot. It took 60 million for bacteria to evolve to
| be able to decompose wood. Which is where most our coal comes
| from.
| Maursault wrote:
| Those wood decomposing bacteria are the evolutionary slackers
| of the Carboniferous Era. Our new plastic decomposing
| bacteria evolved in only 60 years. In 60 million years of
| evolution they'll have their own space program.
| simonh wrote:
| That's not really known for sure, likely a very long time. It
| mostly seems to slowly structurally degrade into micro-
| particles, at the time scales available to us so far. The
| nearest analogy I'm aware of was the Carboniferous period,
| which occurred because the lignin in woody plants couldn't be
| broken down by organisms, so it accumulated in vast quantities
| in bogs and such. These massive deposits of undecayed organic
| matter eventually fossilised, under the conditions of
| temperature and pressure developed by geological formations,
| into coal and oil.
|
| So a long time might turn out to be a very, very long time
| indeed.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| The Anthropocene will be marked by the plastic-rich strata.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I'm sure at some point down the line, a future generation
| can use 'old' plastic a a resource. I'm of the (amateur)
| opinion that plastic should be separated out by type, then
| stored / sequestered until it can be used as a raw material
| again, instead of dumped or incinerated as it is now.
|
| Of course, this will take a lot of storage space and
| logistics, and at the moment it's not cost-effective
| because plastic is so cheap to produce, but at the same
| time, I (again as an amateur) see it as a long-term
| investment.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| Up to a point, but a lot of it is already broken down
| into microparticles and distributed across the surface of
| the earth. I mean, _all_ of the surface of the Earth -
| from deep sea bed (1) to beaches (2) to mountains (3) to
| the Arctic (4).
|
| We're decades late with what you're suggesting. The
| "long-term investment" did not happen. There is no
| conceivable way to collect it all up now, and it's in the
| fossil record for the long term.
|
| 1) https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/30/mi
| cropla...
|
| 2) https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2021/april/over-
| four-bil...
|
| 3) https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/nov/20/mi
| cropla...
|
| 4) https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/rem
| ote-ar...
| dwighttk wrote:
| Don't forget cleaned
| xattt wrote:
| Also a fossil record of chicken bones!
|
| (1) https://www.newscientist.com/article/2187838-when-
| humans-are...
| 323 wrote:
| How much energy is there in plastics to be released? More than in
| wood?
|
| If there is a decent amount, it's almost inevitable that life
| will find a way.
| guntars wrote:
| Quite a bit higher than wood, comparable to diesel (in some
| cases). Whichever bacteria figures this out is going to be
| king.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#In_chemical_rea...
| yalogin wrote:
| Does this mean someone somewhere is kicking off research on a
| material resistant to these microbes?
| Victerius wrote:
| ... please no. Isn't there enough plastic pollution already.
| ars wrote:
| It already exists, it's called PVC (the chlorine is likely to
| be a large barrier to bacteria eating it).
|
| And most things do not use this plastic, so you don't need to
| worry.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| Bugs eating through moisture barriers sounds like a bad
| thing.
| beeboop wrote:
| Or plumbing, drainage, electronics, cars, and a million
| other things
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| Have you ever worked on an older house or car? Plastic
| rots, one way or another, and those moisture barriers will
| have become brittle and useless over time. I don't know
| what causes this to happen, especially when we keep being
| told plastic will outlast civilization itself, but my
| experience is that plastic in usage has a very definitive
| shelf life.
|
| You replace it as you do with anything else that exists.
| Everything requires maintenance.
| ericbarrett wrote:
| Yes, plastic degrades mainly through oxidation, water,
| and UV exposure. The danger is that these kinds of things
| just embrittle the plastic, causing it to crack, flake
| and powder into smaller pieces ("chain scission"), which
| we believe are still endocrinologically significant. True
| biodegradation would mean the plastic is reduced to base
| chemicals like CO2.
| hkt wrote:
| Probably - widespread microbial digestion of plastics is a
| civilization ending event for us, I expect.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| Plastics were hardly used 100 years ago, and civilization was
| thriving. Going back to that might be difficult, but the
| world will mostly be the same.
| swagasaurus-rex wrote:
| How about metals?
| jdauriemma wrote:
| I wonder what waste products the enzyme produces? Apologies if
| this is a nonsensical question, I don't know much about biology.
| dnautics wrote:
| depends, but it's probably ultimately broken down into CO2.
| Halogens become salt, due to dehalogenase.
|
| edit: dehalogenase, not halogenase
| danuker wrote:
| > broken down into CO2
|
| Might as well burn them in district heaters then? Provided
| you catalyze/capture the non-CO2 compounds as well as
| possible.
| dnautics wrote:
| burning is less precise and will have indeterminate
| byproducts - soot - (dioxins e.g.), because it's a fast
| process.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I'm a layperson, but, 'clean' CO2 sounds preferable over
| those byproducts. At least CO2 is captured and
| sequestered by plants.
| z3t4 wrote:
| You can burn co2 also.
| SapporoChris wrote:
| Sorry, no. Carbon dioxide will not react further with
| oxygen no matter how hot you get it. In other words, it
| will not burn.
| z3t4 wrote:
| sorry, I was confused by the dirty byproduct carbon
| monoxide (CO), which is a dirty gas you get from burning
| plastics, which can be burned into carbon dioxide (CO2) -
| which is considered harmless except that it's a
| greenhouse gas.
| danuker wrote:
| Dioxins are intermediaries in the process of current wood
| and coal-burning plants. But they eventually get burned
| as well.
|
| > The gas-phase dioxins can be substantially destroyed
| using catalysts, some of which can be present as part of
| the fabric filter bag structure.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incineration#Dioxin_crackin
| g_i...
| Zamicol wrote:
| Plasma converting/gasification doesn't have the "fast
| process" problem. (Of course it has its own challenges to
| solve.)
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| Proper trash incineration will not produce complex
| molecules. It does require an actual plant designed for
| that instead of a pit in the ground, though.
| jboy55 wrote:
| Do the actual microbes emit CO2 or is some of that carbon
| used in replication? As awesome as it sounds that plastic
| will be biodegradable, I'm sure there's a lot of plastics are
| used in critical places with the assumption they won't
| degrade in nature. If microbes/enzymes do release a lot of
| CO2 in this process, are we destroying the atmosphere for the
| sake of the landfill? Does anyone know how many tons of CO2
| are trapped in plastics?
| dnautics wrote:
| > Do the actual microbes emit CO2 or is some of that carbon
| used in replication
|
| Yes
| smsm42 wrote:
| Bacteria can (and do) also produce methane, which is even
| worse greenhouse gas.
| donkarma wrote:
| From a quick view the bacteria eats all the products of the
| enzyme
| baxuz wrote:
| Bacteria. Not bugs...
| Victerius wrote:
| What's the output? If microbes can eat plastic but turn it into
| CO2, it solves one problem, but creates another.
| guggleet wrote:
| Plastics already emit greenhouse gases.
|
| https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
| freemint wrote:
| But way less
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