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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.
We all know how easy it is to keep a car dry in the PNW.
Bro rust isnt the issue up there its damn moss growing on your car. If it sits too long (or even if it doesn) shit starts looking like treebeard.
And the pine needles. So many pine needles. Every little crevice and hole on your car, stuffed to the brim with pine needles.
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.
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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
I mean tbh that seems like a pretty good start 🤷🏻♂️ styrofoam is a very common type of plastic produced in huge quantities…
No my styrofoam monument I was hoping it would last forever
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.
Even if we don’t eat it, converting the plastics to something biodegradable would be a huge win.
No disagreement here.
It is not a matter of conversion. most plastics can be recycled or burnt cleanly. It is a matter of collection, sorting and operationg the recycling facilities at an economic rate. The last thing can be done easily. Just introducing a high enough tax on non recycled plastics would do the trick.
As always in capitalism plastic waste is not an issue that lacks technological means. What lacks is the economic and political will to deal with it.
Most plastics cannot be recycled, and produce disproportionately high levels of greenhouse gasses and toxic fumes when burned. Burying plastic in an encased landfill is the best way to dispose of it, otherwise it will end up in the water cycle. If we can feed it to mushrooms or bacteria, the world will get cleaner over time.
Landfills regularly leak. As the plastics are not decomposing by themselves, you end up with infrastructure that needs to be maintained forever. Otherwise you just move the problem into the future. And for plastics that do decompose somewhat in a landfill it is less controlled than in a dedicated recycling or disposal facility.
At the same time burning plastics at a high enough temperature and washing the exhaust gas, can effectively remove them from existence. The most common plastics like PET, PE, PP, and many more can be burnt cleanly, e.g. the only product will be CO2. Plastics like PVC need more dedicated facilities, but it is perfectly possible.
Landfills are always the worst option of waste treatment, except for just tossing stuff into the environment directly. We shouldn’t hope for some mushroom to eventually deal with the problem. The first step is to reduce the production of plastic wastes. The second is to deal with collection and recycling/disposal properly. Neither steps are taken properly in the current capitalist economy with externalized costs.
Landfills do leak, and that’s a problem. They aren’t a good solution, it’s just the best one we have at the moment. That’s why the mushrooms are a promising step.
Washing the gas and smoke from burning plastics is a myth sold by the plastic industry. You cannot eliminate polys and heavy metals from the exhaust, and few waste burning facilities bother to even pretend to try. The process is expensive, requires complex facilities, and you’re still left with the waste water full of caustic and toxic effluent.
I agree that reducing, or eliminating, plastic use is the best path forward. I disagree that recycling plastic is a technology that will save us from ourselves, though. I see it as a form of greenwashing the plastic industry, when only 35% of plastic going to recycling facilities actually gets recycled. Don’t get me wrong, something is better than nothing, but how many people don’t think twice about their plastic use because all of it goes in the special blue bin? Recycling led to an increase in the amount of plastic produced, which far outweighs the benefit of having recycled some of it.
I’m with you that creating an expensive, permanent facility to store waste seems like a bad idea. But pretending that we can avoid it without reducing our consumption is why we’re never going to stop.
I have to disagree heavily there. Thermic plastic disposal is standard in many developed countries and cleaning of combustion exhaust gases is an established and reliable technology.
It just costs money and requires regulatory oversight, that some countries like to cut on.
You gave heavy metals as an example. No mushroom can clean away heavy metals. They can only break down molecular components. Heavy metals are one of the compounds why thermal disposal is necessary. You can wash the heavy metals out of the exhaust gas, concentrate them and then store them in more dedicated facilities, e.g. old salt mines.
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.
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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.
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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.
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
damn! didn;t think of that
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.
Not to mention, all the nutrients that would normally be returned by their decomposition will never return back into the ecosystem.
We have a simple biologocial solution for all of that. Peatlands. They transfer the carbon into more and more stable chemical compounds that end up being sequestered. All the coal that is extracted now used to be peat some hundred million years ago.
Just leaving them on the ground allows them to decompose naturally. A better option is to not cut your grass, or have a native groundcover lawn.
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.
Sounds like a good plan. I don’t know. Considering the rate at which we produce plastic, I doubt we could ever grow enough mushrooms to keep up, but it would be worth funding the research.
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Speak for yourself
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Why not
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I think you are wrong, do you have anything to back your claims?
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we can also not just let the entire world become Forrest.
We could make charcoal from the trees and bury the same amount we dug up, but as long as we burn coal for power it’s kind of pointless.
Well it’s going to happen one way or the other. The only question is whether humans will be there for it.
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I wouldn’t underestimate our capacity to fuck up the planet. When the food runs out and the water riots spread, things are going to go south very quickly for the human race. We like to make post apocalyptic movies about how we survive in the desert that used to be Iowa, building war-cars from scrap and isolated communities from the remainders. The reality is that almost everyone will die off without the electricity, medicine, and food production we have all come to rely upon. Gasoline will expire in the tanks of a million cars, and the ammo will run out faster than the potato chips. Farms will be pillaged, and GM seed stocks don’t produce a new generation.
When society breaks down, all the little things will fall away, and we’ll all realize how actually few survival skills people actually have.
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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/)
Watch out for badgers and snakes tho
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.
