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If this really is a new discovery, what would astound me is how easily everyone else must have given up.
[1] Not that it would take anything away from this guy, who did it at 16 with limited resources and probably without regard to existing research.
Good stuff, but it's still that (Western?) way of thinking about treating the symptom.
You think that, instead of ridding the world of billions of rather large and bulky objects that won't decompose for thousands of years, we should leave those alone and instead focus our thinking on how not to produce any more. I imagine a cartoon of a man standing on the earth with a megaphone screaming,
"Everyone - listen up! This - this thing right here - it's incredibly important and I want everyone (and i mean everyone) to focus exclusively on it!
World - are you listening to me?
Stop trying to do other things! I don't care if thousands of you end up reproducing each others work - it's all in the name of solving this problem!
I said stop trying to multitask - we've got to exclusively solve this one thing!
World?
Hello?"
Good stuff, but it's still that (Western?) way of thinking about treating the symptom.
The process he went through is so obvious that someone must have done this already [1], right? Right? If this really is a new discovery, what would astound me is how easily everyone else must have given up. [1] Not that it would take anything away from this guy, who did it at 16 with limited resources and probably without regard to existing research.
Good stuff, but it's still that (Western?) way of thinking about treating the symptom.
I'm absolutely effing baffled at your statement so forgive me if I seem incoherent. Here's what I assume from your sentence: You think that, instead of ridding the world of billions of rather large and bulky objects that won't decompose for thousands of years, we should leave those alone and instead focus our thinking on how not to produce any more. I imagine a cartoon of a man standing on the earth with a megaphone…
Good stuff, but it's still that (Western?) way of thinking about treating the symptom.
That the parent has been moderated down so much is troubling.
Solved? He demonstrated a proof of concept. But this was not news.
Was the product of decomposition environmentally safe? Is the process economically feasible? Does it scale?
All three questions need to be yes before we can say he solved the problem.
Having said that, I am not knocking the kid or his school project. We need more experimentalists in the world.
Good stuff, but it's still that (Western?) way of thinking about treating the symptom.
The above poster has a valid point. He thinks that rather than making millions of single-purpose plastic bags and then going through an expensive process to clean up after them, we should instead not produce the plastic bags in the first place. For example, we could just keep canvas bags in our cars. That the parent has been moderated down so much is troubling.
It's only troubling until you understand why.
No one would reasonably argue against the idea of producing something other than plastic in the first place.
The downmodding was most likely in response to the word "Western". Bash the U.S. (or anyone else, for that matter) and get downmodded. What's so troubling about that?
You can make a logical point on hn without insulting anyone else. The downmodding here is a clue to do just that.
If you have garbage of all different kinds, this technique is useless.
Everyone with basic scientific literacy already knows you can do this. But it doesn't solve any problem, let alone "the most intractable problem of our time" or whatever.
This whole article is just linkbait written by interns to scam more ad impressions off of dumb people. Wired has truly learned much from the Reddit acquisition.