On one hand, cleaning up plastic pollution is a fantastic thing. On the other, there is a tremendous amount of carbon currently locked up in plastics which is for all practical purposes inert. Releasing that into the atmosphere is yet one more thing that will accelerate climate change.
It also will require a massive shift in our material usage. Bacteria breaking down that plastic bag in the ocean is great. Bacteria setting in on construction, medical devices, or your NES is not so ideal.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc...
1.6% of petroleum products consumed in the US went to petrochemical feedstocks (which I'll take to be mostly plastic). Far more petroleum is just burned, and this doesn't even count coal. In terns of CO2, plastics are almost negligible.
That's a great point, and one that may make material planners think twice about using plastics over other materials like metals, woods, or plasters in their projects.
Plenty of bugs eat wood. From fungi to termites. And yet we can still use wood for construction.
I have apocalyptic dreams of plastic-eating plagues swarming our civilization out of nowhere.
During carboniferous, microbes couldn't eat lignin from wood. Now we have fungi and all sorts of bacteria (including those termites host) that can make use of it.
Oh, and time. Life is more diverse now than it was during carboniferous, but it still took millions of years for bacteria to learn how to digest lignin/wood.
My point was: whether we use GMO or not, such a thing might happen naturally.
There is also a chance that such a mutation does not offer much competitive advantage if other nutrients are easy to find, and the mutation disappears. I wouldn't bet on it though, given the number of ecological niches that exist.
Basically wood cells are hard to penetrate, don't provide a food source if they've been air dried, and even in cases where fresh cut wood isn't dried quickly, organisms don't cause enough damage to affect wood's strength. Pretty fascinating stuff.
> Deterioration Without Decomposition. When fresh-cut lumber or veneer is properly air-seasoned, the stored food materials in the sapwood are soon depleted by the respiratory processes of the wood parenchyma cells themselves. If drying is delayed, however, the fresh-cut wood can be invaded by so-called sap-stain fungi and algae, or by bacteria and molds that develop over the surface or penetrate deep into the sapwood by growing through the ray cells from one wood storage cell to another. These organisms use the contents of the wood storage cells as food and thus do not affect the strength of wood seriously; they primarily discolor the wood or alter its permeability. When fresh-cut wood is kiln-dried immediately, the living cells of the sapwood are killed by the heat and the reserve foods are retained in the wood storage cells. If kiln-dried wood becomes wet again, these stored foods can again become substrates for growth of discoloring fungi and bacteria.
Source: https://www.fpl.fs.fed.us/documnts/pdf1984/kirk84a.pdf
Discoloration only? But then what is rot?
Another common method is to protect the wood with a layer of plastic (polyurethane, paint, etc). That's evidently out the window...
The other way we protect wood is to acknowledge that it will get damp, and pressure treat it with poison so that mold can't grow on it.
We might have a harder time with traditional limewash. It is rather caustic and takes a long time to prepare. And while you can achieve different colors with it, it's not the uniform easy perfectness modern paints have. It also has to be re-applied periodically, so it's not as hands off.
It's a bit like gyp rock. You can buy these sheets that go up quickly and easily even for the lay person (I've built a wall). Lathe and plaster existed before that and worked well enough. It's a lot more work though.
Long-term stability of plastics means that the problems from microplastics today could still be problems in a million years. It's worse than nuclear waste in that regard: at least the hottest isotopes degrade quickly and the less hot still halve on a predictable schedule. Currently, for a lot of plastics, all you've got removing them from circultion are UV degradation and weathering processes, along with processes burying them in sediments for unknown periods.
But the microbial environment could at least confine this to be a very bad problem for our time, instead of forever.
I'm certain in 100-150 years it will be viewed in the same way.
If we want anything to change, we need systemic changes to what behavior is incentivized by the world we live in - and I can not think of anything that would do the job other than abolishing or at least heavily restraining capitalism.
What I believe he's saying is: even if it looks like bacteria may eventually begin to chip away at the microplastics problem, we still face the prospect of having them accumulate for decades or longer in bigger lifeforms and cause problems.
(But at least today's plastic releases wouldn't be a problem forever).
That is, this improves the situation greatly but doesn't remove any of the nearer term suck.
That's not really accurate - if an organism can breakdown (digest) plastic to any extent, it can do so all the way to water and CO2.
There are a few exceptions: Teflon and PVC are the main ones, but most plastic is pretty simple, and once digested it will not accumulate.
I can't breakdown most plastic to any significant extent.
If I ate small pieces of plastic, some would be excreted in poop and some would accumulate in my body.
If I ate animals that have eaten small pieces of plastic, being high up the foodchain, this may be exacerbated (biomagnification).
If bacteria learn to degrade plastic--- that may improve the situation for my grandchildren but it probably doesn't reduce how much is accumulating in marine life now that much.
Actually you can't break down plastic at all. You can just grind it with your teeth.
> If bacteria learn to degrade plastic--- that may improve the situation for my grandchildren but it probably doesn't reduce how much is accumulating in marine life now that much.
This is where your mistake lies - if you can degrade plastic at all, then you can degrade it all the way to water and CO2. There is no partial degrading here, you either can, or you can't.
(Note: I am speaking of degrading plastic for its energy content, which is what bacteria would do. Mechanically breaking plastic into small pieces is not the same thing. Nor is de-polymerizing the plastic.)
I said most plastics. Some plastics have a ton of starch bonds or are vulnerable to HCl, and can be broken down by mammalian digestive tracts. I have good enzymes to break starch bonds, and I have HCl in my stomach, so I can digest e.g. TPS to a great extent or PLA to a lesser extent.
> This is where your mistake lies - if you can degrade plastic at all, then you can degrade it all the way to water and CO2. There is no partial degrading here, you either can, or you can't.
I think you're not understanding me. One species of bacteria beginning to digest plastic all the way to water and CO2 doesn't instantly remove all the plastic floating in the ocean, let alone removing it from the marine food web where it has accumulated. It doesn't even guarantee the amount of plastic in the ocean goes down: it's easy to imagine situations where the rate at which bacteria remove plastic from the oceans is lower than the rate than it is introduced.
Therefore, even after some bacteria begin to break down some plastic, plastic can still accumulate in other organisms in the ocean. The long term prognosis is greatly improved, but things are not guaranteed to improve much at all in the near to intermediate term.
Like you said, energy reach.
That's a lot of ifs. Right now significant biodegradation of plastic by marine bacteria is still pretty unlikely. Further presuming that the bacteria capable of this will also evolve to exist within the gut of higher marine line is a bit of a leap: guts are a pretty harsh competitive environment and "random" bacteria you ingest don't go live there. And, it further presumes that all the accumulated plastic resides within the gut (it doesn't).
Where does it reside?
No one really knows what the impact of this is. Maybe it's not too bad. Maybe it is.
Some are probably toxic, but so are naturally occurring heavy metals, etc.
Or, as you put it, another find showing the same trend.
I think it would be difficult to pinpoint how long it will take for plastic to become biodegradable. Evolution is a sporadic process.
They have evolved, but there aren't a ton of them yet. It's not very surprising to me that this happened. Just consider how many times covid has mutated and then extrapolate out to how much genetic diversity is likely in play.
I do think if it were being done by humans in a lab intentionally even directed evolution would work this out in a few years. In the environment they're competing against other microbes that eat sugars and other easier to grow on stuff so I'd expect these to be a niche species.
Is there a word for it?
One of the advantages of consuming a novel food source like plastic is a relative lack of competition; this means you wouldn't expect there to be a lot of benefit for producing toxins to kill off competitors for your foodstuff.
(For an analogous case, the microorganisms that can grow on maple syrup don't tend to produce toxins; there's not much of a need when their food will kill most bacteria.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shockley%E2%80%93Queisser_limi...
There will never be a shipment of 90% efficient solar panels. Unlike fusion, nobody has even predicted that 90% efficient solar panels might be available in a decade.
If this is just a hyperbolic way of saying that people predict more efficient solar panels all the time -- well, yes they do. Many of those panels actually make it to market. The first terrestrial solar panel to reach 20% efficiency was introduced in 2012:
https://newsroom.sunpower.com/press-releases?item=122881
Today, a half dozen manufacturers offer modules over 20% efficiency. And the newer entrants are all doing it with simpler and more affordable cell designs than SunPower used in 2012.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_water_heating#Energy_pro...
Is this actually an entirely new discovery in the sense that this was an unexpected find, or is this just another find of many showing the same trend? And what kind of time frames should I be expecting before plastics are considered biodegradable like other natural materials?
I have to admit, the idea that plastic could become biodegradable in a few decades changes my perception of their use a little and I'm not sure this is a positive thing, especially if this is something that isn't likely to happen for a very long time.