this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2024
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As with everything that sounds too good to be true... what's the catch?
I see this every couple years (I think it's the same). The fungus can only degrade very few plastic types, like Styrofoam.
So are we disappointed it's not the perfect solution, so we don't bother?
Sounds like we're on the right track and someone can find a way to make money with this, or decide to dedicate their resources to it for society's benefit.
We don't bother because those few kinds of plastics aren't the ones that are causing most of the polution
If something costs millions and only works in a limited space, at specific conditions, and recycles 0.2% of all plastics, why would anyone want to invest in it?
Because 0.2% of all plastics is still a lot of plastic.
Okay, so go out and pay millions of dollars yourself and do it. If you can't, why do you expect anyone else to do that, with no hope of return, no hope of sustainability and such?
Because they should care about the future of the human race more than their current bank balance.
We're doomed as a species.
Then again - go out, sell your house and do it. It's great to be outraged when "nobody is doing it". Yet everything requires money to do. I have a company producing humanitarian supplies. Do you think I would be able to do it / should I do it for free?
You're preaching from the selfish soapbox of only caring about your own bank account, not humanity's best interests.
Expending my assets to make a difference wouldn't make a dent and I'd be completely left with nothing. Someone with massive wealth can expend 95% of their resources and still live a more comfortable existence than 99% of us.
Why are we protecting the dragons sitting on the piles of gold instead of taking the gold and investing in our species' future prosperity?
We're doomed.
Then again - go sell off your house and do it.
Ah, so it wouldn't make a difference if you sold your house. For me, it would make a difference if someone did that and donated all the money to me. It would let me produce way more humanitarian aid and send it out to people in need. It would let me hire more people, expand the business and ultimately save more lives.
We aren't protecting anyone. You are just saying empty buzzwords like "save the planet". Yet you aren't willing to stand by it yourself, and you imagine some billionaire doing it for you. It costs you nothing to want that from them. So they pay infinitely more for it than you, despite the solution not making sense in any capacity and scale.
So again, why should they invest into a fungus that eats 0.2% of all plastic, that needs a specific temperature, humidity, location etc to work, and can probably make as impactful of a change, as if you sold your house and paid people to handle litter better? It's a definition of wasting millions on nothing. It doesn't make sense to do it even with infinite funding since there are better ways to recycle.
It isn't absolute bullshit, it's in the interest of a country. We have private scrapyards, recyclers and landfills that do that over here and they keep on going. It's simply because this specific idea is so out of place, so hard to implement and just has "techbro" written all over it. It's impractical and useless, yet it sounds cool to people who don't know a thing about recycling.
I think I deleted that message because I was being bullshit. Sorry.
We already have the perfect solution. Stop producing plastic. But we sure as hell are not bothering with that either.
Its no exaggeration to say plastic is essential to modern society
I'm not sure why you are projecting disappointment on others. Best of luck mate
Fantastic. Styrofoam is not recyclable like Polypropylene or even the Polyethylenes. Styrofoam ends up in landfills. I want it in mushrooms.
It’s not the magic bullet but it’s a fucking howitzer. Yas kween.
Styrofoam is technically recyclable, it's just that there are very few facilities that handle it.
You're doing good thing, thank you
Thank you, but the better thing I did was to kick Amazon to the curb and lessened needless purchasing. Thus I have much less packing materials to recycle. That's the real win for me.
Lots of Styrofoam out there we need to get rid of
I mean tbh that seems like a pretty good start 🤷🏻♂️ styrofoam is a very common type of plastic produced in huge quantities…
No my styrofoam monument I was hoping it would last forever
From other times something like this came up:
Probably more, this is from the top of my head. Also, this will still cause the plastic to eventually be converted into CO2 which is released in the atmosphere.
Having it actually break down into CO2, water and a few other things would be way better than it permanently contaminating our food, water and ecosystems.
I agree, and it will probably break down anyway giving enough time. But it would be even better to take it out of the environment completely. The best would be not to even produce it for trivial stuff, so it doesn't get to pollute the environment.
While it would be great to phase them out, we have to work with the world we have. One that wont switch off plastic production overnight and one that is already thoroughly contaminated. Something is going to be needed to break down what is already out there and minimize the damage of what continues to be produced.
You get a similar result by burning it for electricity and that removes coal/gas from the grid.
Youre not burning microplastics dispersed through water as fuel.
Do you want to worry about plastic rotting like wood does?
Yes. That'd be way better than having it kill animals and contaminate our food and water to the point where you basically cant avoid it. We literally want plastic to biodegrade. Just as long as it biodegrades after we are done using it. Which would be a wonderful problem to have compared to the current state of things.
While edible the mushroom tasted like garbage.
Even if we don't eat it, converting the plastics to something biodegradable would be a huge win.
No disagreement here.
It is not a matter of conversion. most plastics can be recycled or burnt cleanly. It is a matter of collection, sorting and operationg the recycling facilities at an economic rate. The last thing can be done easily. Just introducing a high enough tax on non recycled plastics would do the trick.
As always in capitalism plastic waste is not an issue that lacks technological means. What lacks is the economic and political will to deal with it.
Most plastics cannot be recycled, and produce disproportionately high levels of greenhouse gasses and toxic fumes when burned. Burying plastic in an encased landfill is the best way to dispose of it, otherwise it will end up in the water cycle. If we can feed it to mushrooms or bacteria, the world will get cleaner over time.
Landfills regularly leak. As the plastics are not decomposing by themselves, you end up with infrastructure that needs to be maintained forever. Otherwise you just move the problem into the future. And for plastics that do decompose somewhat in a landfill it is less controlled than in a dedicated recycling or disposal facility.
At the same time burning plastics at a high enough temperature and washing the exhaust gas, can effectively remove them from existence. The most common plastics like PET, PE, PP, and many more can be burnt cleanly, e.g. the only product will be CO2. Plastics like PVC need more dedicated facilities, but it is perfectly possible.
Landfills are always the worst option of waste treatment, except for just tossing stuff into the environment directly. We shouldn't hope for some mushroom to eventually deal with the problem. The first step is to reduce the production of plastic wastes. The second is to deal with collection and recycling/disposal properly. Neither steps are taken properly in the current capitalist economy with externalized costs.
Landfills do leak, and that's a problem. They aren't a good solution, it's just the best one we have at the moment. That's why the mushrooms are a promising step.
Washing the gas and smoke from burning plastics is a myth sold by the plastic industry. You cannot eliminate polys and heavy metals from the exhaust, and few waste burning facilities bother to even pretend to try. The process is expensive, requires complex facilities, and you're still left with the waste water full of caustic and toxic effluent.
I agree that reducing, or eliminating, plastic use is the best path forward. I disagree that recycling plastic is a technology that will save us from ourselves, though. I see it as a form of greenwashing the plastic industry, when only 35% of plastic going to recycling facilities actually gets recycled. Don't get me wrong, something is better than nothing, but how many people don't think twice about their plastic use because all of it goes in the special blue bin? Recycling led to an increase in the amount of plastic produced, which far outweighs the benefit of having recycled some of it.
I'm with you that creating an expensive, permanent facility to store waste seems like a bad idea. But pretending that we can avoid it without reducing our consumption is why we're never going to stop.
I have to disagree heavily there. Thermic plastic disposal is standard in many developed countries and cleaning of combustion exhaust gases is an established and reliable technology.
It just costs money and requires regulatory oversight, that some countries like to cut on.
You gave heavy metals as an example. No mushroom can clean away heavy metals. They can only break down molecular components. Heavy metals are one of the compounds why thermal disposal is necessary. You can wash the heavy metals out of the exhaust gas, concentrate them and then store them in more dedicated facilities, e.g. old salt mines.
Well, everytime I see an article saying "we've found a [mushroom | bacteria | whatever] that eats plastic, yay!", I always think: well, yeah, that's great, but what about all the plastic we don't want eaten just yet?
keep those away from the mushroom?
Anti-fungal cream, baby!
The amount of micro-plastics in everyone's blood - even in tiny remote villages that have had next to no contact with the outside world - might make human beings look like an attractive meal to them? Surely nothing bad could happen if instead of micro-plastics we all have fungus in our blood?
Human beings already look like an attractive meal to all kinds of bacteria and virus
Yeah, that's what our immune system is for.
There are hundreds of different plastics, each chemically different and created for different conditions. At least with heavy metal detoxification, fungi also tend to bioconcentrate what they eat. You can't eat them growing off a hemlock tree without being poisoned by hemlock. Something will eat these and probably get a belly full of petroleum byproducts or whatever it metabolises that into.
My prediction: Edible mushrooms are gonna turn out to be not that edible when they’re grown on plastics.