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?
As if the micro plastics crisis hasn't already made the "pie in the sky" solution a necessity at this point
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)
The other fun trick with the plastic eating bacteria articles is to never mention what the bacteria produces from the plastic. Let the reader assume that whatever is being produced is better than the plastic itself.
Holy shit the net thing is shocking, I have never heard that before.
They'll stop fishing soon anyway when the natural stocks have completely collapsed.😭
PET is one of the most worrying plastics because it's soft and sheds microplastic easily.
Also, microorganisms are fairly easy to adapt to other food sources because of how rapidly they evolve. Coupled with genetic modification I don't think it's impossible for this to be adapted to all forms of soft plastic.
And while this is good. It is also going to cause problems when bacteria starts eating plastic we don't want it too.
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 definitely feels like the biggest problem with this idea and I suggest we keep that techbro as far away from the solution as possible 😂
Will they attempt to eat us as well since we now have plastics within our body?
What do you folks think, unleash it on every dump on earth? Or cultivate it in pseudo-recycling centers?
