Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Teen Decomposes Plastic Bag In 3 Months

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 74 posts

Re: Teen Decomposes Plastic Bag In 3 Months

#41

Post by mrkurt »

onreact-com wrote: post #39
TrevorJ wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Historically people die over anything desirable. Food, land, water, gold. There's no solution other than fixing human nature itself.

When did the US start the last war about food, land, water or gold?

1) War doesn't have a monopoly on killing people.

2) We've forcefully relocated (and killed!) people for their land several times in the past few hundred years.

3) How much violence in this country is sparked over money? Michael Mann's made some pretty good movies dramatizing bank robberies that result in gunfights.

Re: Teen Decomposes Plastic Bag In 3 Months

#42

Post by pohl »

Every time this story comes around I'm struck by one thing: it's no wonder that kids tend to dream more of becoming professional athletes than they do of careers in the sciences. If they do they do something great in the former, no one will deny their accomplishment. If they do something great in the latter, the response will be "Meh".

Re: Teen Decomposes Plastic Bag In 3 Months

#43

Post by biohacker42 »

alex_stoddard wrote: post #38
rawr wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The boy's achievement was decomposing polyethylene. I'm not entirely sure how Nylon-eating bacteria are relevant.

Indeed. To quote the more detailed original newspaper article linked from Wired: http://news.therecord.com/article/354044 " A researcher in Ireland has found Pseudomonas is capable of degrading polystyrene, but as far as Burd and his teacher Mark Menhennet know -- and they've looked -- Burd's research on polyethelene plastic bags is a first."

They must not have looked very hard: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=23...

Re: Teen Decomposes Plastic Bag In 3 Months

#44

Post by wizard_2 »

warfangle wrote: post #24
Alex3917 wrote: post #20

If you have all plastic of the same kind, it's much better to recycle it. 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. W…

A lot of plastic recycling isn't recycling - it's downcycling. Plastic bottles become carpet becomes landfill fodder. It just delays the inevitable. A lot of this has to do with the dyes used in plastics manufacturing. It also has to do with the limited mutability of most plastics - the quality of the plastic after one cycle of recycling (in this example, plastic bottle -> carpet) is reduced. Once it's turned to carp…

This reminds me of a ted talk by Ray Anderson on "the business logic of sustainability". http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/547

He founded and is CEO of a world wide carpet company. He figured out how to effectively recycle his carpets and how to reduce the amount of petroleum in the production. He now controls almost the entire life cycle of his carpets and manages to keep a tremendous amount of waste out of the landfill. Which is good, mainly because his business was responsible for a lot of that landfill.

As a nice side note, it was his attention to waste and his drive for seeing his company achieve sustainability (he defines it as not taking anything from the earth that cannot be easily replenished) that saved his business from probable collapse during the crash of 2001/2002.

Re: Teen Decomposes Plastic Bag In 3 Months

#45

Post by biohacker42 »

wtdominey wrote: post #25

This article is from 2008. Any updates?

Plastic is easy enough to recycle/burn/bury and that's what happens most of the time. A lot of plastic pollution is from micro particles that escape during the process of manufacture, shipping, etc. China banned plastic bags because: They were sick of them, alternatives are easily available and some times authoritarian governments can do the right a lot faster then democratic ones. The rest of the world continues as before, except that this story keeps making the rounds.

Re: Teen Decomposes Plastic Bag In 3 Months

#46

Post by die_sekte »

froo wrote: post #33
joshfinnie wrote: post #8

Wonder how much heat this process creates? Could we get rid of plastic and run a turbine? Maybe there's a hope for green energy afterall...

What if we used genetically engineered bacteria like what startup LS9 are working on to create petroleum as the waste product? http://www.ls9.com/ That would quite literally blow my mind then.

We also could blow the CO2 into urban greenhouses, which could make growing plants in the city more economic.

Re: Teen Decomposes Plastic Bag In 3 Months

#47

Post by teej »

euroclydon wrote: post #22
edw519 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

Well, I questioned whether it's a Western phenomenon. I'm not trying to bash the U.S. I like being a citizen. I was actually trying to make an analogy to diet, health and medicine, where Western lifestyles have traditionally been found to be inferior to Eastern ones, because we, on average, eat crappy food, get diseases, then spend a bunch of money trying to fix the symptoms of those diseases.

When I was in Western Africa, I got a plastic bag for practically every single purchase I made, even in rural markets.

Re: Teen Decomposes Plastic Bag In 3 Months

#48

Post by Confusion »

biohacker42 wrote: post #43
alex_stoddard wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. To quote the more detailed original newspaper article linked from Wired: http://news.therecord.com/article/354044 " A researcher in Ireland has found Pseudomonas is capable of degrading polystyrene, but as far as Burd and his teacher Mark Menhennet know -- and they've looked -- Burd's research on polyethelene plastic bags is a first."

They must not have looked very hard: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=23...

It's doubtful a high school student and teacher know where to look. They should have asked someone in, only remotely related, research for a quick search to dig up these kinds of papers.

Re: Teen Decomposes Plastic Bag In 3 Months

#49

Post by biohacker42 »

Confusion wrote: post #48
biohacker42 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They must not have looked very hard: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=23...

It's doubtful a high school student and teacher know where to look. They should have asked someone in, only remotely related, research for a quick search to dig up these kinds of papers.

The above link is the top search result from a search for bacteria and polyethylene: http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=bacteria+polyethylene&#38...

Re: Teen Decomposes Plastic Bag In 3 Months

#50

Post by asciilifeform »

pohl wrote: post #42

Every time this story comes around I'm struck by one thing: it's no wonder that kids tend to dream more of becoming professional athletes than they do of careers in the sciences. If they do they do something great in the former, no one will deny their accomplishment. If they do something great in the latter, the response will be "Meh".

> If they do something great... the response will be "Meh".

I still think that there are too many externally motivated people going into science, rather than too few.

Post reply on HN