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Scientists accidentally create mutant enzyme that eats plastic bottles

If something figures out how to eat plastics, it'll probably be good for the environment but it'll be a massive pain in the ass for society in a lot of ways. Although it's not like plastics don't degrade in some other ways, limiting their useful lifespan.
 
13th Fleet said:
If something figures out how to eat plastics, it'll probably be good for the environment but it'll be a massive pain in the ass for society in a lot of ways. Although it's not like plastics don't degrade in some other ways, limiting their useful lifespan.
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Let me introduce you to this beauty. A plastic-eating fungus, found -- just last year, I think.

Time will tell how that develops.
 
I think the bigger part of the news here is that plastic-eating bacteria already exist in the wild, given that it was found in a landfill in the first place, so people should probably start planning for that future day when plastics in general become as biodegradable as everything else.
 
Roadie said:
I think the bigger part of the news here is that plastic-eating bacteria already exist in the wild, given that it was found in a landfill in the first place, so people should probably start planning for that future day when plastics in general become as biodegradable as everything else.
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I've heard from a market stall owner that they have to be careful with how many biodegradable plastic bags they order at a time. If they get too many, they start to, well, biodegrade before they can be used.
 
foamy said:
Isn't this the sort of thing that killed the Ringworld?
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Nah, we have wires and fiber optics that aren't plastic, and accessible sources of new usable substances rather than nothing below us but dirt and scrith, so worst case scenario this is merely a horrible disaster rather than a permanent medieval stasis inducing apocalypse.
 
And silicones are pretty good at many things we use plastics for.

(Until they also start to get digested, then we'll look stupid. But I'll be really interested by that chemistry.)
 
There are many, many kinds of plastics, all with different molecular structures. No enzyme's going to cleave all of it, and bacteria will honestly struggle to break even one. It's not well-known, but cellulose is basically the same sort of material -- a tad more rigid, that's all -- and fungus still struggle to break that down, if not as much as when it was new. It's been around for a while.

So don't worry, we're not going to wake up and find that all our machinery is rotting. This is a scenario that will play out over decades to centuries, with plenty of chances to leapfrog evolution, all the while our science and technology keeps progressing.

Nor would the ability to eat plastic allow bacteria to grow without everything else they need, such as water. Cotton rots*, but your cotton clothing is fine so long as you don't leave it wet for long periods of time.

*: Cotton will not appear to rot, but if you try it, you'll find it disintegrates and goes away. Effectively the same thing; the bacteria do eventually get a meal.
 
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Let's just make our important, longer lasting stuff out of polymers such as polyethylene, polypropylene and polystyrene instead. Those don't break down by biological means, and if microorganisms lack a way to break down lignin and gain energy doing so, they won't do it anytime soon.

(Fungi have had nearly 300 million years to evolve lignin-degrading enzymes, and yet they still expend more energy breaking lignin than they can get back from it, meaning a pile of lignin, like what you get after processing pulp to make paper, is best disposed by combustion, since the fungus won't do it for you.)
 
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How the fuck do you make something better at destroying plastic accidentally.

Humanity is fucked, aren't we? We're going to be tinkering with something to cure cancer and it's going to get out and kill us all.
 
vyor said:
How the fuck do you make something better at destroying plastic accidentally.
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Real discoveries don't start with a "eureka", they start with an "oops".

I mean, you need insanely long hours of work and research on something tangentially related to get to the point where the oops can happen, but still.
 
Zap Rowsdower said:
Real discoveries don't start with a "eureka", they start with an "oops".

I mean, you need insanely long hours of work and research on something tangentially related to get to the point where the oops can happen, but still.
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And one of these days the "oops" is going to kill us all.

And that's why we need to kill everyone else first. It's clearly the rational solution.
 
Naw we just need to engineer sea creatures to digest and live on the plastic in the ocean.

Just make sure we don't do it to goats or raccoons.
 
Lord Invictus said:
Maybe they should use the bacteria for landfills.

That would be good.
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Depends on if its aerobic or anaerobic. IIRC a major problem with landfills is that outside the top layer of trash it can be hard for air to get to, leading to lack of breakdown of technically biodegradable stuff (mostly paper and food waste).
 
And, of course, you have to take in account what gets degraded into what, otherwise you might end with a horribly polluted landfill, just in a different way than it was previously.

I think it'll be more useful in a controlled environment, so, "just" better recycling of more things.
 
Somebody said:
Let's just make our important, longer lasting stuff out of polymers such as polyethylene, polypropylene and polystyrene instead. Those don't break down by biological means, and if microorganisms lack a way to break down lignin and gain energy doing so, they won't do it anytime soon.

(Fungi have had nearly 300 million years to evolve lignin-degrading enzymes, and yet they still expend more energy breaking lignin than they can get back from it, meaning a pile of lignin, like what you get after processing pulp to make paper, is best disposed by combustion, since the fungus won't do it for you.)
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Err, PE and PP have a slight problem with oxidation, so you might want something different... just look at the lawsuit with the transvaginal PP mesh lawsuit, it was ugly
 
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