Are greenhouse emissions lower when fermenting some sweet tea, versus extracting oil from the earth, refining it, converting that into plastic, then forming that plastic into the shape you want?

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say, yes.

SCOBY is basically a waste product from producing kombucha, you have to remove an amount from each batch which (in the case of home brewing) is usually given away to others for free or discarded, not sure how they handle it with industrial-scale kombucha making. So this could be more of a clever recycling that doesn't produce any more CO2 than was already being produced during the making of kombucha.

No, it's a good point and I'd like to know as well. Ofc being biodegradable means it will sooner find it's way into some photosynthesis and recapture that carbon.

To be fair, the carbon content of a conventional circuit board is already sequestered in the circuit board.

This is true if you make naive assumptions like making circuit boards are a clean technology with no CO2 emissions or other harmful side effects. That of course is entirely incorrect. Printing circuit boards are very energy intensive along with a lot of other impacts like toxic waste and heavy water use.

> In the US, a single fab, Intel’s 700-acre campus in Ocotillo, Arizona, produced nearly 15,000 tons of waste in the first three months of this year, about 60% of it hazardous. It also consumed 927m gallons of fresh water, enough to fill about 1,400 Olympic swimming pools, and used 561m kilowatt-hours of energy. (source https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/18/semicond...)

Kombucha on the other hand, yes produces CO2 as a waste product, but it is very easy to see a kombucha SCOBY being carbon neutral. That is the source of it's sugars being carbon energy free, and the manufacturing process of SCOBY circuits as well. Then it's carbon neutral

Is that Intel fab doing circuit boards or etching silicon wafers for integrated circuits, a completely different operation.

Doing a CPU out of a scoby would be real bio computing :)