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Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting solution to plastic pollution

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Re: Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting solution to plastic pollution

#301

Post by RugnirViking »

wyldfire wrote: post #210
burntwater wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's (apparently) common knowledge among reptile owners. That doesn't mean it's common knowledge among the particular scientists studying how to decompose plastics. Siloed knowledge will always be a problem (at least among humans. With omnipresent AI, that could change...).

A day in the life of the omnipresent AI's keeper involves a lot of "Oh, no, sorry, CleverBot2000, we can't solve that global problem that way. This domain's model is incomplete, I guess."

'but keeper, if walmart take the price of your meal off your order and you can refund no questions asked, can't we solve world hunger and the economy by taking and refunding free meals infinitely?'

Re: Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting solution to plastic pollution

#302

Post by Chris86 »

greenshackle2 wrote: post #150
Chris86 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I'm not sure why anyone would think burying waste underground is an okay solution. It made sense when most household waste was fabrics, wood, old food etc but nobody stopped quick enough to evaluate the impacts when our waste got more and more toxic and non-biodegradable. I've recently move to the Netherlands from the UK and was amazed to discover they don't recycle household metal items (e.g. soft drinks cans,…

A modern landfill is not like a landfill back then either, there's a lot of engineering that goes into it, it's not just a hole in the ground. You make it sound like no thought was given to the problem but municipal solid waste disposal is an entire science and engineering discipline. There is room for improvement but I'm pretty ok with modern landfills. Methane capture IMO is the biggest lack. It's such a waste to l…

Interesting, well that is reassuring as nobody I asked in the Netherlands believed that they were recycled.

Regarding your early point, obviously there is a industry built around waste disposal - but the problem is still that we are creating types of waste that are destined for landfill. The fact there is this option to put it in the ground is a barrier to solutions for how we package our products, which chemicals we use, what we actively recycle etc.

Re: Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting solution to plastic pollution

#303

Post by darth_mastah »

matz1 wrote: post #223
mikeash wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because insects have such a primitive nervous system that we don't see them as being aware in the same way that a dog is. You draw the line somewhere , right? Drawing the line at a certain complexity of the nervous system is more sensible than drawing it at "animals" in general, IMO.

I draw the line at Human and Not Human.

Why limit yourself? Draw the line between you and not-you. Such fun.

Re: Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting solution to plastic pollution

#304

Post by animal531 »

greenshackle2 wrote: post #248
komali2 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, that's a cheap strike to go straight for hypocrisy as a means to win this argument. Whether or not the person posting the argument "animal testing is bad" eats meat doesn't change the question - "should we fatally test on animals." I'm a bit disappointed that nobody is really engaging this non-sarcastically. A couple are talking about "drawing a line" somewhere but nobody is being allowed to say "all life…

I can see how it comes across that way but I'm fascinated that OP does not kill flies, I was genuinely curious if it extended to farm animals too. I would have bet they are vegetarian. The question is worth considering, I wrote up a detailed answer on why I don't care about insects in a sibling thread. EDIT: I'm not well placed to argue from hypocrisy, I'm like 90% vegetarian but I still eat meat. Meateaters love tak…

That's because there's no such thing as 90% vegetarian, it's a binary option which you've re-purposed into a scale.

I eat meat at every opportunity, but if I were to calculate a number such as yours then I'd be say "65% vegetarian" just due to the volume difference between meat and the rest.

People taking a swing at you is most likely just because you describe yourself as a vegetarian to them even though you're still eating meat (regularly) while in their presence.

Re: Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting solution to plastic pollution

#305

Post by balthamael »

Eleopteryx wrote: post #180
mikeash wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because insects have such a primitive nervous system that we don't see them as being aware in the same way that a dog is. You draw the line somewhere , right? Drawing the line at a certain complexity of the nervous system is more sensible than drawing it at "animals" in general, IMO.

>You draw the line somewhere, right Yeah, I just have to worry about higher beings justifying the termination of my primitive nervous system "for science". Perhaps my consciousness is so dim relative to theirs that it would be analogous to me squashing a bug. I hope that their methods are advanced enough that they don't need to.

Any consciousness vastly superior to ours would be so complex that we wouldn't even be aware of it. So it wouldn't matter what it would do to us. It's the same with most animals. We might as well be gods to them. An ant lives in a completely different reality. The whole concept of "animal rights" is based on the flawed notion of trying to equate our reality to that of completely different beings. Something that is unable to even understand the concept of rights is incapable of having them, or morals, to begin with. Rights are not given, they are taken. There is a reason why humans rule Earth and not gerbils. Rights or morals didn't exist until we invented them. There is no objective spiritual truth out there.

Consciousness requires a critical mass of brain power. A wolf is relatively intelligent but not conscious, they are biological machines that only think about killing and mating and they have been doing that, without change for hundreds of thousands of years. And if the environment doesn't change then they will continue being identical for hundreds of thousands of years more. Trying to give animals human properties is really very foolish. It's like trying to do that with computers, just because they can give us illusions of intelligence and consciousness, but because computers don't have cute faces and cuddly bodies nobody thinks about it. Evolution really is very efficient but brutally so. Only reason why humans have things like compassion is because it has been evolutionarily advantageous to us. A single human is really quite weak and underpowered, we need to cooperate, it's the key to our progress. It is also why we think babies are cute and why we are instinctively protective of them and why sex feels good. There really is no deeper meaning behind any of it. If we had evolved from tigers then the world would look very (brutally)different, because tigers are solitary and territorial animals that have absolutely no use for things like compassion, empathy or cooperativeness. We wouldn't think twice about killing anything if it suited us, not even other tigers and it would be completely normal to us. If some hairless ape came to us on his high horse and started preaching about morals and rights then we would think that he was crazy, and then we would eat him.

Re: Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting solution to plastic pollution

#306

Post by usrusr »

chrisweekly wrote: post #266
komali2 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, that's a cheap strike to go straight for hypocrisy as a means to win this argument. Whether or not the person posting the argument "animal testing is bad" eats meat doesn't change the question - "should we fatally test on animals." I'm a bit disappointed that nobody is really engaging this non-sarcastically. A couple are talking about "drawing a line" somewhere but nobody is being allowed to say "all life…

Non-sarcastic question about "all life": don't you _have_ to draw the line somewhere? Bacteria? Vegetables?

I'd even want to put particularly nicely shaped rocks on the "don't" side of the line. Kill a plant to save a rock? It's called building maintenance. Kill a short-lived animal to protect a mighty old tree that has seen entire cultures come and go? Sure! There might even be some rocks that I would hesitate to destroy if it saved a human life, maybe not even excluding my own. The beautiful thing about life is that in the grand scheme of things, only avoiding extinction matters.

Re: Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting solution to plastic pollution

#307

Post by SophosQ »

cortesoft wrote: post #104
goatlover wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bigger problem is everything that doesn't make it into the landfill, particularly the plastics that get into the water. The oceans have tons of plastic breaking down into smaller pieces that fish and birds and eat.

But how will these caterpillars help with that issue?

We could try and replicate the degradation processs or find a similar one in the lab. Nature has often been an inspiration for new inventions such as burrs for Velcro.

Re: Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting solution to plastic pollution

#308

Post by OJFord »

adrianN wrote: post #60
TeMPOraL wrote: post #8

Would be good to have plastic waste broken down, but be careful not to take down our whole civilization with it. Almost everything today is made out of plastic...

Wood is biodegradable, yet we manage to use it in long lasting products.

Or, even more on-theme, woodworm.

Re: Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting solution to plastic pollution

#309

Post by mikeash »

dTal wrote: post #297
mikeash wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you breathe through a filter and sweep the ground in front of you like the Jains?

>as far as practically possible There's a big difference in effort, and not much difference in outcome, between doing as the Jains do and simply endeavouring not to kill things on purpose.

I don't see what's impractical about breathing through a filter and sweeping the ground. Inconvenient, to be sure, but that's far from the same thing.

I mean, I wouldn't do it, but it seems to me that if you're advocating "as far as practically possible" then it would include that.

Re: Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting solution to plastic pollution

#310

Post by freeflight »

ams6110 wrote: post #280
freeflight wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If a caterpillar eats it who knows where it ends up. In the water? In the ground? In our food? In our blood? That assumes landfills are hermetically sealed systems, they are not. We have plenty of examples where landfills contaminated the groundwater and with it large swaths of ground. It's an irresponsible practice that's pretty much based on the naive principle of "out of sight out of mind". If the goal is to recy…

> We have plenty of examples where landfills contaminated the groundwater and with it large swaths of ground. The old "dumps" had this problem. Modern landfills with liners, leachate management, etc. are probably the best way to handle garbage, out of all the possible options. It's simply not possible or even practical to recycle everything.

Many of those "old dumps" were either exempted or grandfathered from the 1991 implemented federal rules for groundwater quality. The liners sure do help, but they are only a temporary fix because "it's widely recognized that even the best installed plastic liner will succumb to deterioration and eventually will allow leachate to be created and released." [0]

I also never said anything about recycling everything, but at least putting some effort into recycling would already go a long way. According to EPA data [1], the majority of municipal waste disposed of in US landfills is made up of organic materials: 29% paper and paperboard, 27% yard trimmings and food scraps. That's 56% of the landfill of which much could be recycled instead of just being dumped, with composting people can even recycle some of that stuff themselves at home and get some quality fertilizer out of it.

The only thing stopping this from happening is the laziness of people who rather want to dump all their garbage into a single bin/bag and be done with it because waste separation is not considered "practical", even tho there are plenty of countries who've practiced it very successfully for years already and as such are leading the "recycling race"[2].

[0]http://www.waterencyclopedia.com/La-Mi/Landfills-Impact-on-G...

[1]https://archive.epa.gov/epawaste/nonhaz/municipal/web/pdf/ms...

[2]https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2016/03/04/the-co...

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