When a microbe was found munching on a plastic bottle in a rubbish dump, it promised a recycling revolution. Now scientists are attempting to turbocharge those powers in a bid to solve our waste crisis. But will it work?
Who knows what its consequences are? How about a simpler approach, like reducing plastic use maybe instead of some pie in the sky project?
We do probably want both. Even if we end plastic production completely tomorrow, we need to work out a way to clean up all the plastic we’ve already dumped all over the world
I agree. We want both. Its like water consumption needs which keep increasing. We want to reduce demand and increase leakage reduction rather than take more water out of the environment. We’re making a mess of this planet because our lives are based on the assumption of eternal growth.
Who knows what its consequences are?
That’s why they’re doing research genius
What kind of question even is that? Reducing plastic enough and getting rid of the amount that’s already in the environment without new technological solutions is nothing but fantasy at this moment.
Making a nuclear bomb is much easier than keeping people from using it once it’s made.
Natural science is difficult, but getting people to do the right thing is almost impossible.
It will immediately start eating all the plastic that we are still using causing untold damage. Believe me. When I mentioned this before some techbro smuggly suggested that the scientists would just invent some sort of plastic that they couldn’t eat. Thus setting is back to where we started.
This bacteria eats only one type of plastic (PET), and that’s a minority of the plastic we produce
Related, half of the plastic pollution in the oceans is fishing nets; want less plastic in the environment, stopping fishing would be a better first step (and is required for many other reasons anyway)
Either way, were gonna have to deal with the problem of these new bacteria possibly getting into non garbage, such as currently in use consumer electronics, and the eventual push by some companies trying to create “bacteria resistant” plastics, which I’m against, or the eventual knowledge that you shouldn’t leave your phone sitting in certain areas or let it hit lake waters or other areas with high bacteria populations, kind of like wood and keeping an eye out for termites.
Just a thought of what may come, but for the current issues we face, this is still fantastic news
Will they attempt to eat us as well since we now have plastics within our body?
We can only hope
I, for one, welcome our new bacteria overlords.
-starts cooking with Teflon and metal spatula exclusively-
Let’s hope a strain mutates unexpectedly and turns into such an agressive plastic decomposer, it sends us back into the age of reusable containers for every thing.
As polyethylene is just carbon and hydrogen, could microbes that are powered by hydrogen produce something useful like carbon nanotubes or graphene?
