• Gucci_Minh [he/him]
      hexbear
      46
      4 months ago

      This is a good one because the most likely outcome of this is that the fungus spreads to all plastics, not just the waste in the ocean, and soon your household items are getting eaten.

          • EelBolshevikism [none/use name]
            hexbear
            2
            edit-2
            4 months ago

            It would be funny for there to be a massive sewage management issue in every major population center, at least

            Overall though, maybe we shouldn’t be relying on pipes that slowly poison the environment through the slow shedding of microplastics anyways. As ridiculously painful as the transition would be in this case

            • oregoncom [he/him]
              hexbear
              1
              4 months ago

              lots of medical implants are made of plastic. A great number of medical equipment is also made of plastic. Plastic is used ib critical components in everything from airplanes to powerplants. There's not a lot of things that have the same durability, flexibility, and weight as plastic.

              It would really suck if all plastic actually degraded. A better solution imo is to just stop using it for packaging. It's only marginally more expensive to replace it with wax coated paper in the vast majority of cases.

        • Owl [he/him]
          hexbear
          2
          4 months ago

          Lots of medical equipment is plastic.

    • kristina [she/her]
      hexbear
      9
      4 months ago

      this is cool until you realize humans have a non negligible amount of plastic in their lungs and will get some sort of crazy fungal disease in the lung as a result