Environment

3916 readers

3 users here now

Environmental and ecological discussion, particularly of things like weather and other natural phenomena (especially if they're not breaking news).

See also our Nature and Gardening community for discussion centered around things like hiking, animals in their natural habitat, and gardening (urban or rural).

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

Fungi could be the answer to breaking down plastic junk (arstechnica.com)

submitted 1 year ago by hedge@beehaw.org to c/environment@beehaw.org

9 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] fr0g@infosec.pub 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Well burning releases a lot of highly toxic chemicals for starters

[–] Ropianos@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Well, not for polyethylene if done at high enough temperatures. And I doubt that the fungi will like plastic covered in toxic substances. But maybe there is a price advantage there if you don't need to ship the plastic to a incinerator.

I didn't read up on it in detail but apparently incineration has some large disadvantages, only about 22% of all plastic waste is incinerated. So fungi could be useful for the remaining 78% so it might be more useful than I expected.