There was a Doomwatch episode on his subject with airliners falling out of the sky bcause all the plastic had been eaten away. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomwatch#Series_One
Didn't that happen in Andromeda Strain? The de-polymerized polymer?
Engineered yeast for converting plastic and biomass compounds to food additives
11–20 of 107 posts
Re: Engineered yeast for converting plastic and biomass compounds to food additives
#12[flagged]
you are ... plastic insects.
Re: Engineered yeast for converting plastic and biomass compounds to food additives
#13Maybe the only thing more worrisome than microplastics everywhere is unstoppable plastics eating organisms everywhere, eating through all plastics everywhere.
There’s a fantastically silly but fun book about this the name of which eludes me.
Not plastic, but 'Cats Cradle' by Kurt Vonnegut has something kind of like that.
Re: Engineered yeast for converting plastic and biomass compounds to food additives
#14Maybe the only thing more worrisome than microplastics everywhere is unstoppable plastics eating organisms everywhere, eating through all plastics everywhere.
Reminds me of the Taumoeba escaping the Xenonite enclosures.
Re: Engineered yeast for converting plastic and biomass compounds to food additives
#15Maybe the only thing more worrisome than microplastics everywhere is unstoppable plastics eating organisms everywhere, eating through all plastics everywhere.
Perhaps soon you'll be needing to apply stains or sealants to your outdoor plastic items. Maybe even purchase treated plastic products that we worry leach toxic chemicals into their surroundings.
Re: Engineered yeast for converting plastic and biomass compounds to food additives
#16Honestly at this point I think the way to go may be to stop using plastics where they're not absolutely required, and to subsequently burn what goes into landfill while producing electricity and reclaiming heat. Better that than this.
Burn it? With all the talk of carbon capture? Recall that plastic literally consists of a mass of hydrocarbons. Why not bury it?
Re: Engineered yeast for converting plastic and biomass compounds to food additives
#17Maybe the only thing more worrisome than microplastics everywhere is unstoppable plastics eating organisms everywhere, eating through all plastics everywhere.
Usually these bioengineered yeasts need pretty specific growth conditions in order to eat in this case ethylene glycol, not raw finished plastic. In this case they say "plastic-derived substrates" which means they're pre-processing the waste plastic.
Good thing microorganisms are famous for their slow rate of change in dynamic environments…
Re: Engineered yeast for converting plastic and biomass compounds to food additives
#18Maybe the only thing more worrisome than microplastics everywhere is unstoppable plastics eating organisms everywhere, eating through all plastics everywhere.
Why is that worrisome? Might give the fish a chance whose bellies are filling up with plastic rubbish
Re: Engineered yeast for converting plastic and biomass compounds to food additives
#19Maybe the only thing more worrisome than microplastics everywhere is unstoppable plastics eating organisms everywhere, eating through all plastics everywhere.
Timescale is the important bit. If organisms degrade plastics in a few hundred years then what plastics are uniquely valuable for will be quite fine indeed.
Re: Engineered yeast for converting plastic and biomass compounds to food additives
#20Maybe the only thing more worrisome than microplastics everywhere is unstoppable plastics eating organisms everywhere, eating through all plastics everywhere.
There’s a fantastically silly but fun book about this the name of which eludes me.
Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters, a 1971 British sci-fi environmental disaster novel written by medical scientist Kit Pedler and television screenwriter Gerry Davis.
No wikipedia page, but goodreads has it here: