Plastic's main selling point is it's durability, it's resistance to decay. But it's basically made of organic compounds, the thing that makes it durable is it's novelty in the environment and this resistance to decay will not last long. The day will come when it rots like paper, and it's much closer than we think.
This is probably accurate for films and fabrics, but I wouldn't be surprised if thick solids would be at least as slow to rot as wood. I don't know what proportion of plastic mass is in each form though.
Wood is a nice analogy because when it was first evolved there was nothing on earth that could break down the lignin. As a result, we had a couple thousand years where wood just piled up like a global waste crisis. Eventually fungi got really good at dealing with it
We're again seeing a waste crisis due to a novel material and once again fungi might end up saving us (though we don't have a thousand years to wait this time)
You're fifty years late. Doomwatch did an episode called The Plastic Eaters in 1970.
"A plane dissolves in mid-air, its plastic components eaten away. Doomwatch faces its first challenge: to halt the disastrous spread of a man-made virus with the power to melt all plastic."
I’m relieved I’m not the only one who immediately thought of what could go wrong. I’ll admit I didn’t think of the airborne part but I did immediately think of it escaping the landfills.
If these fungi are really capable of eating polyurethane in anaerobic environments, we'd better hope they can't do the same with polypropylene and polyethylene, because if so the polypropylene liners modern landfills depend on to keep their contents out of the groundwater are going to start leaking pretty soon.
(Some landfills use geomembranes of other polymers, too.)
It reads like a summer disaster movie, entertaining but mostly forgettable. What was interesting about the book was as a thought experiment about the use of plastics in critical infrastructure and how much of a nightmare plastic-eating anything could be.
I think the backstory of the Ringworld series was that a superconductor-eating microbe destroyed civilization on the Ringworld, and restarting it was impossible because there were no metals or fossil fuels to mine. On the plus side, on actual Earth, at least most of the metals are still in the landfills.
There is something I find a bit confusing with the idea that we should find ways of degrading plastics.
Our big concern right now is climate change, and it is in large part driven by CO2 emissions. Plastic is sequestrated carbon, degrading plastic means finding life forms that turn plastic into CO2. Why do that when we are trying so hard to avoid putting more CO2 in the atmosphere. And should we want do destroy that plastic, we can burn it in furnaces and use that energy for ourselves.
As expected, the article mentions unproperly disposed plastic that ends up where it shouldn't be. Plastic-eating mushrooms won't solve that problem unless they work and spread in the wild, which is highly unlikely: these solution usually require very specific conditions. For example PLA is technically biodegradable, but unless you are using an industrial compost plant, it won't. And if these mushrooms work in the wild, we will have a bigger problem...
> Researchers have now found that many species are capable of plastic bioremediation including the common, edible Oyster mushroom. The Oyster mushroom is capable of decomposing plastic while still creating an edible mushroom.
Am I the only one who's tired of these types of news articles that describe an exciting-sounding possible, hypothetical future innovation and present it as if it were already here?
We've heard the same about “clean” nuclear power, about efficient energy storage in massive batteries, electric zero-emissions passenger aircraft, what have you. None of these things are real yet.
Please, can we have news about things that are actually real? Tell me about the plastic-eating mushrooms when there is a landfill (or ocean) in which the mushrooms are actually, actively eating plastic. Until then, this is smoke and mirrors and creates an unhealthy false hope.
> Am I the only one who's tired of these types of news articles that describe an exciting-sounding possible, hypothetical future innovation and present it as if it were already here?
While I'm sure you're not the only one, I'm certainly nothing like you. One of the biggest draws for me to a site like this is the innovative technology. I love it. Sometimes it doesn't pan out -- actually, it's rare for any technology to be broadly useful soon after its invention.
When I was a kid, LEDs were big, clunky, and red. Now they're making meters-long panels of full-color LEDs on a nearly microscopic pitch. The only solar panels were tiny and could only power a desk calculator. Those technologies impressed me back then, and the advancement continues to marvel.
Electric vehicles have been exciting since Henry Ford made one. It took about 100 years for viable commercial EVs, and another 20 for wide adoption. Before Tesla, that would have made the list of "None of these things are real yet."
I'm personally excited by what's on the frontier of technology. Whatever you can buy in the store today... that's the doldroms. Perhaps the risk of failure is what makes for genuine excitement?
Fascinating. Why were they red? Every LED bulb I've looked at has been a headache-inducing blue. I wanna buy LED bulbs for the energy efficiency but it's so hard to find one that doesn't emit so much blue light
> I wanna buy LED bulbs for the energy efficiency but it's so hard to find one that doesn't emit so much blue light
I have a similar hatred of cool-blue lighting, at least in the home - but you should know it's very straightforward to find LED bulbs that look good these days. Just pay attention to the "temperature" - it will look like "3000k" or "4000k" on the box. Lower is warmer - 2400k is pretty identical to incandescent, though I go for 3000k. Some makers will label them "soft white" vs "daylight" or "warm white" - as far as I know, there's not much of a standard on those terms, but I can assure you that anything "daylight" or "bright white" will be blueish. Hope this helps!
Some LED fixtures have a color temperature switch which changes the "warmth" of the light. Intended to be set on installation, but could be changed later if you want.
To simplify: Red is the lowest energy visible light and therefore the easiest to produce. Blue is the highest energy, and therefore the hardest.
It is telling that the 2014 Nobel Prize in was awarded to the inventors of the blue LED, and not one of another color.
Once you have blue LEDs, using phosphors, you can convert that high energy blue light into a spectrum of lower energy wavelengths, i.e. white light. You can't have white light with red and green LEDs, or at least not that easily.
As for you finding LEDs too blue, that's most likely an issue with the phosphor mix they are using, maybe there are some LEDs that go below the typical 2700K "warm white" standard that will be more to your liking. I don't think lighting with pure red or pure green is a good solution since without a blue component at all, blue objects will appear black, and you will have a result a bit like with these yellowish high-pressure sodium lamps that are common in street lights, which in technical terms is a low CRI. You can try it though: get RGB lights and set them to red, green or yellow.
Red was the first color for LEDs. Later, yellow and green followed. But blue took a long time to develop, and early blue LEDs were very expensive. So now, I think, it‘s a fashion thing. Because red and green LEDs look so „1990“, manufacturers put blue LEDs everywhere to scream „Look how modern I am!“.
(In Germany, it goes so far that electric cars have to have blue lights on the outside and everywhere on the dashboard so that everyone can be sure that, yes, this is innovative technology. That there‘s actually a reason to favor red in settings where it‘s important to protect one‘s night vision doesn‘t seem to matter.)
Simple blue light LEDs created a residue on the surface of the lens like a cataract and kept them from being useful in panels and individual lights. The “invention” of the blue led was really just a slightly convoluted way of keeping the lens clear.
Even more so than some of those technologies, although they sound very promising don't address the issue about the intensity of the energy expenditure required by the developped world mode of life, and we are wasting most of it. Decarbonize everything but keep going like yesterday won't cut it. So your algae shoes are great but it is not sustainable to buy a pair every month. You plastic eating bacteria are great but we can't keep using so much plastic anyways. It's not that I don't want it to be possible, it's just that the current reports about the state of the planetary climate system seem to indicate that we are on the edge of a cliff and that we have to make the best/choices decisions to avoid falling off of it. It's not going to happen, it is happening. Please people don't call me a doomer and stop the denial. Go listen to the people that are actually studying climate. They're are not happy about it. And rich smart tech people are not here to save you. They will buy themselves islands with private guards is what they're gonna do.
I don’t know where the idea that western style energy consumption is an issue, but the sun provides several orders of magnitude more energy than is needed.
The vast majority of the energy humanity uses is actually sunlight hitting crops. Our dependence on fossil fuels is mostly a question of costs and existing infrastructure. We have hundreds of millions of ICE cars and the infrastructure to keep them fueled. Swapping that to EV’s over 40 days is impossible, but doing so in 40 years is relatively easy.
Do you think solar panels are infinite? Have you looked at the price of lithium lately? It's been exploding and the only reason solar panels are economically viable is due to heavy gov't subsidization.
What happens when a solar panel dies out after ~25 years? We're already in an e-waste crisis. Less than 10% of panels in the US get "recycled" (and by that ofc we mean shipping them to 3rd world countries so we don't have to deal with it). There's only one facility in the whole world currently that has the capability to fully recycle a PV panel (Veolia in France). Every other place just takes the easy parts out and dumps the rest because the economics and risks to health aren't worth it
Not to mention rapidly ramping up production of stuff like EVs is going to have devastating immediate impacts on the climate. EVs are only more carbon-efficient than ICEs after a few years. The reason for that is because of the initial production of EVs produces almost twice as many GHG emissions as the production of an ICE. That's significant since initial production can be as much as half of a vehicle's lifetime GHG emissions
In practice they basically are. Panels are 90-95% silicon which makes up for around 28% of earths crust. That’s largely why they aren’t recycled, they simply aren’t made of partially valuable stuff.
The mounting brackets etc on the other hand are actually recycled.
But you are missing the point, getting lithium, mining in general, or other collecting practices require a lot of carbonized energy or have bad influence on ecosystems that actually are guarding against worse climate change
Using words like “a lot” is deceptive here, quantities can be large relative to individuals and minuscule relative to the environment. That said, mining can be done using 100% renewable energy just like anything else.
You are assuming that we have enough energy to harness all that energy from the sun. Extracting materials to harness all that energy costs energy, carbonized energy. Another issue is we don't really have 40 years anymore depending on how you look at it. So the issue still stands.
Crops do harness energy from the sun, but they can only do so at a certain pace which does not correspond to human pace, and in certain conditions, a stable given climate, which we are guaranteed to be leaving behind us now.
The issue is emissions not time. If you cut down emissions by say 75% then you have four times as long to hit the same amount.
Climate change isn’t some wall where X is absolutely fine and X + even 1% more is disaster. We are seeing negative effects today and they just get very slightly worse as emissions increase time the CO2 ppm increases by 1.
I mean, yes, that was implied, since we have not even starting decreasing the amount of carbon we let into the atmoshpere time = emissions. It's like I tell you I earn X$ dollars and month and then you tell me "Yes, but only if you go to work that month". I guess you are right but you're kinda missing the point. I really don't see emissions being reduced by 75% any time soon, so then, no, we don't have 40 years. Even if we stopped emitting carbon now, there would be bad consequences further down the road.
Exactly, this is not some wall and partly unknown territory, the thing is that this destabilization has inertia and we will suffer the consequences even after we have started actively removing carbon from the atmosphere if that ever happens. Another thing are self sustaining global warming mechanism that have been kicked off and that we don't know the effects of. So it won't get slighly worse, it is getting exponentially worse.
The US has dropped CO2 emissions by 15% since 2007. That’s a meaningful change.
Global numbers aren’t a rosy, but if you look at a developing country like China it produced 17.7% of their electric from renewables in 2008 and that jumped to 27.8% in 2019. While their economic growth more than offset that change, solar and wind adoption is currently much faster than economic growth both in China and around the world.
As to self sustaining global warming that’s not exponential. The current amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will result in a fixed amount of warming that hasn’t happened yet. It’s not an exponential increase just a lag between emissions and increases temperatures.
It's not just energy. You're responding to someone talking about how many things we buy and how much plastic we waste in general. Westerners need to learn that growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell.
Even EVs are illustrating the problem. Rather than make transit efficient we're going to greenwash individual cars. Remind me where those EV batteries come from? Who cares about the externalities of lithium mining — just put multiple EVs in every home, widen the highways, add some interpasses. For people who don't have cars today (most of the world) will we be providing EVs as well?
At some point it will be too late and people will experience a rapid decline in quality of life (it's already happening if you look at lifespan) with no recourse. Easier to be in denial about that than to, say, not eat meat every single day. Or not have same-day and two-day free delivery in a country where 80% of product transportation is done by truck.
It would be nice to have a silver bullet, but the reality is people will have to make adjustments willingly or have it done for them by the biosphere. The Earth is going to be just fine. Whether or not we will remains TBD.
I don't know how this is downvoted, other than people's reflexive distaste to being told they need to consume less. Say what you want, but you can't cheat science. The CO2 levels in the atmosphere are rising rapidly, and people are changing little in terms of the quantity they consume. Those goods are still being shipped around the world. It's simple math, if we consume roughly the same resources we will continue to produce the same amount of waste. Obviously technologies like nuclear power or widespread solar use would change this situation-- but adoption isn't fast enough to outrun global warming. People are desperately hoping for some revolutionary invention that will break this equation and allow us to consume without consequence. I hope so, but honestly there's a real chance that won't happen.
Because it doesn’t line up with reality. The US and Europe has dramatically reduced CO2 emissions and increased consumption. The US is down 15% from 2007 to now and that tend isn’t stopping. Global warming emissions is currently being driven by developing economies but they are going to be investing in the cheapest technology which is renewable energy.
Just look at say China’s electric grid and it’s percentage of Coal vs Wind and Solar or it’s EV adoption. That change is based on cold hard economies.
Plastics covers a wide range of different materials some are roughly as damaging to the environment as wood.
I don’t want to get into the rest of your post, but I would recommend digging a little deeper before you declare something a problem rather than a tradeoff.
I have a problem with such a claim. When measuring how "damaging to the environment" something is, what are we looking at? Compostable plastics, for example, might seem more eco when looking at the waste, but the truth is that just means they're breaking down into micro-plastics faster
How do we measure the impact of those microplastics? Is it by how expensive a micro-plastic clean-up would cost taxpayers? Is it by the (admittedly marginal, but very widescale) increases in health care costs to people that are impacted by it?
I think if we actually took a full-scale assessment of these sorts of impacts, we'd have a lot of trouble making such a claim
Beyond saying that growth for the sake of growth is bad, you're saying that having nice things is actually bad. Same-day or two-day shipping is nice. Automobiles are nice. Not having those things is already a rapid decline in quality of life; why wait for a climate catastrophe to do that, when you can just make nice things illegal to have?
If we all lived like cavemen, we wouldn't need to worry about our carbon emissions.
Let's lift everyone up to the "westerner's" standard of living, instead of the other way around.
>Not having those things is already a rapid decline in quality of life; why wait for a climate catastrophe to do that, when you can just make nice things illegal to have?
No offense but this is a really selfish point of view. The point is in one situation only we are uncomfortable, and in the other situation almost every creature on the entire planet is uncomfortable possibly for the rest of human history. The truth is we live unsustainable lives and people have to come to terms with that. If we can't, eventually we'll be forced to. Even if you don't want to.
Also, I honestly think life isn't that much worse without 2 day shipping. People literally lived without it for millennia. We know that we can be happy even with fewer conveniences. Giving those up is another story.
I was just on holiday in a city where having a car was a necessity in order to go anywhere fast. Now I’m back in Belgium where I can use a bike.
I had an app where I could order a car for some occasions and the app is nice. But I do not think it’s superior to a more efficient city: better public transport and bike infrastructure.
I agree with you that having nice things isn’t immediately bad, but especially Americans tend to confuse the things they’re used to for “nice things”, fault of not having tried the better alternative yet.
Your comment shows total ignorance or unwillingness to care about the global threat that climate growing instability represents to the whole human race. Reading comments like that now is truly terrifying to me You are either old and don't care because you may not live long enough to live through the consequences or are in total denial of what's happening.
I, for one, like hearing about cutting edge research and discoveries. I am fine with not being able to right away purchase an implementation at a retail store.
Haven't read the article fully, but the field of "mycoremeditation" has been around for a while and has been used for treating certain scenarios of toxic cleanup.
How much time per day dop you spend looking for something to post your disdain about, as compared to how much time you actually focus on solutions? Im just curious
As for the more inert plastic waste, as the other comments here have mentioned already, the fact that it's inert means it really isn't a problem. It'll just exist naturally and perhaps get mined in the future for recycling.
Does this digestion actually break down the molecules into biodegradable organic compounds? If it leaves a significant portion intact it may just drastically increase the amount of microplastics.
This is cool, but how do we prevent "good" plastics (for example buried PVC pipes and fiberoptic cables) from being eaten in the future, and only bad plastics targeted?
Maybe we should change the way we think about architecture. Japan has some of the longest lasting buildings in the world and it's because they're specifically built with modularity in mind. It's built with the knowledge that parts will rot and have to be replaced and built in a way where you can replace a part of it without the whole thing collapsing.
Maybe we should think of our buildings the same way and just admit that pipes are gonna break and nothing lasts forever. And plan for it rather than against it.
I think that's where the software industry has naturally evolved with SaaS and where a lot of other industries are slowly evolving towards. Maybe it's time for architecture to do the same
The hyphen makes it unambiguous that "plastic-eating" modifies "mushrooms". Without the hyphen it could refer to some hypothetical type of plastic that eats mushrooms. See:
Funny that AI is certain the mushrooms are made of plastic. I don't think many people get this as a first interpretation. (Personally, I got the plastic doing the eating one.)
I like that one of them is a fly agaric (the classic red with white spots toadstool) that's poisonous.
While you can eat them after boiling, it's not really a go-to example for an "eating mushroom". Really shows that there's still a lot of context blindness in AI.
Also it seems to have glommed firmly onto the "mushrooms for eating, that are made of plastic" parse.
