A disturbing but effective way to test the hypothesis.

What a great accident.

Lignin (wood) and cellulose are pretty tough to break down, but there are things that eat them.

Plastic fundamentally (chemically) is made of the same stuff as wood, just in a different arrangement of atoms, and releases energy when decomposed. So it seems quite reasonable that there would be things that can eat it.

I think the plastic pollution we are seeing right now is a temporary thing - soon enough there will a large enough population of plastic eaters that it will no longer be a problem.

(We should avoid plastics that have chlorine in them though, except where needed. PVC is the most common example of a plastic like this.)

The biggest problem with plastic is not with the products that make it into the landfill, where bacteria could be used. The problem is with what happens when they don't make it into a landfill, and they end up as basically permanent pollutants in the water.

The levels of abraded plastic in our water have gone up steadily over the past half century. While not so much of an immediate threat as rising CO2 levels, it's still something we'll have to contend with eventually. Not to mention the eyesore that is plastic waste. If they can make this work at industrial scale it will really be something!

Scaling up enzymes ftw! Anyone interested?

IndieBio, $250k seed investment: http://indiebio.co/companies/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tineola_bisselliella

The worms can't live in landfills. If you could separate the plastic before landfilling to feed it to worms, then you could just burn whatever separated plastic can't be recycled. (Yes, that releases CO2, but so does having worms and bacteria eat the plastic.) The problem with plastic as waste isn't that it is super-toxic or impossible to destroy. The problem is that it's mixed in with a lot of other kinds of waste. We don't need new ways to destroy polyethylene. We need ways to separate it from mingled waste streams or prevent mingling in the first place.

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es504038a http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/plastic-loving-bact... http://news.stanford.edu/pr/2015/pr-worms-digest-plastics-09...

We heavily subsidize both wind power and solar. We even still subsidize gasohol even though it doesn't produce the environmental benefits we first thought that it did.

But we don't subsidize degradable plastic made from corn which isn't used widely because it costs a few cents more than plastic made from oil. That has never made any sense to me.

Isn't this the same as burning some plastic and saying 'plants can eat it now', just without the direct emissions?

In the small scale, it can solve some local problems. But in the larger scale, shouldn't we just bury plastic deep underground? Of convert it to fuel in substitution of further fossil fuel extraction?

Moderately toxic, but breaks down in the air in about 10 days. Used in antifreeze.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethylene_glycol

http://www.kidsdiscover.com/quick-reads/penicillin-found-fun...

It is however amazing that nobody (me included) never thought that this could be a solution to our plastic issues. "It's common knowledge, why waste time thinking about it?"

https://m.phys.org/news/2014-12-gut-bacteria-worm-degrade-pl...

Long molecule chains in plastics seem like they would be easy. I guess it takes the right blender to chop it up!

I also imagine a small caterpillar-sized blender involved. Now I need a smoothie.

> The most frequent hydrocarbon bond is the CH2–CH2, as in PE (Figure S1B). Although the molecular details of wax biodegradation require further investigation, it seems likely that the C–C single bond of these aliphatic compounds is one of the targets of digestion.

Which seems to imply methylene(o) as the byproduct?

Also burning plastic releases more than just CO2:

> The most dangerous emissions can be caused by burning plastics containing organoch- lor-based substances like PVC. When such plastics are burned, harmful quantities of dioxins, a group of highly toxic chemicals are emitted. Dioxins are the most toxic to the human organisms. (i)

(o) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methylene_(compound)

(i) http://www.wecf.eu/cms/download/2004-2005/homeburning_plasti...

Meaning: If plastic made from PLA ends up in waterways, the oceans, etc it won't degrade there and actually just breaks down into smaller parts creating the exact same sort of problem as microbeads (except PLA doesn't last nearly as long as other plastics regardless).

The other problem is that bioplastics have lower glass transition temperatures than, say, PET or ABS which is what most plastic products are made from. So you're not going to be using PLA in a car dashboard, for example since it would deform rather quickly on a hot summer's day.

"But there's high-temperature PLA now!" Yes, yes there is. You know how they make it "high temperature"? By adding fossil oil-based chemicals to the polymer. This process results in PLA that leaves residues after degrading. It's similar to "wood fill" or "bronze fill" filament in that a certain percentage of it is PLA whereas the rest is the usual does-not-break-down-ever stuff. Better? Yes. A long-term solution? Not really.

...and for reference, we do subsidize bioplastics to the tune of billions of dollars every year:

https://farm.ewg.org/progdetail.php?fips=00000&progcode=corn

PLA and most other bioplastics are made from corn husks.

"Wait: I thought it was pretty much all made from corn?" Nope! There's a teeny tiny percentage of bioplastics made from algae. Now there's the future!

We already have these ways, they are called waste separation and recycling. As a German, I've been separating my garbage for as long as I can think back: Plastics, paper, organic waste and whatever remains as residual waste. In addition to that, we have separate bins for glass bottles, if there's no bottle deposit on them.

Residual waste bins are usually the smallest ones, so people are pretty much forced to separate their waste if they don't want their residual waste bin full after just one week.

It's always weird to me when I'm in another country and everybody just throws everything into the same bin, bottles included, just feels so wrong to me at this point.

You realize evolution works in timeframes that are like really really long? On an evolutional timescale 2000 years is pretty much nothing, to us humans it's pretty much our whole modern history of massively polluting this planet.

The pace with which we are changing this planet is way too fast for evolution to keep up with it. If changes to the environment are so fast and so radical then no living thing has time to adapt, they will be extinct before having any chance at adaption.

It does seem likely to me, however, that the number of insect species capable of eating through plastics and also breaking the plastic molecules down must surely number greater than one.

That said, bacteria can evolve pretty fast because of high population sizes and low generation times. In the 50's they found a bacteria that had evolved to digest the synthetic material nylon. I wonder why bacteria haven't evolved to digest plastic yet. Possibly there is some scientific reason that it's inefficient to digest. Maybe we could speed evolution up by dissolving plastic in a liquid first so it's more accessible to them.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/C8ED057F-...