this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2023
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Environment
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At the risk of sounding super ignorant the desire for plastic to biodegrade always seems really short-sighted to me? I understand that there are problems with plastic pollution for the ecosystem and that there may be health concerns with microplastics and whatnot... And that we probably shouldn't make so many disposable items that we do want to degrade out of plastic (and that we should probably not have as many disposable items in the first place)... But plastics are also kind of miracle materials and ideally you want them to not break down in many use cases. Like, wouldn't it be bad if all of a sudden we have bacteria that will eat through blood bags and plastic structures?
It seems like this article is mostly talking about studying microbes to design plastic eating enzymes that will help efficiently recycle plastic in the future, and that sounds super cool and very useful. But the whole "we should have bacteria that can quickly break down plastic in the environment" angle that I hear about a lot seems kind of risky to me because one of the reasons plastics are so awesome is that they're very resistant to degradation... Maybe I'm just ignorant, though.
Breaking down plastic is already super super unappealing to any life form. The biggest reasons it's so useful to us is because it's basically super tightly woven strands which the engineered bacteria have to be forced to break apart, when the planet is filled with more readily available food like sugar molecules. The plastic eating bacteria they discover in the "wild" basically were isolated and surrounded only with plastic, and so had literally no other choice.
Releasing this bacteria into the wild won't be an option (but given human nature it will remain an option), their use would likely be in closed facilities with big vats to break down plastic (operated by the lowest paid employees who can't wait to skip the decontamination hallway because the football game is tonight).
Them skipping the imaginary decontamination hallway wouldn't be a problem because of exactly what you outlined in your first paragraph