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Plastic-eating enzyme could eliminate billions of tons of landfill waste

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Re: Plastic-eating enzyme could eliminate billions of tons of landfill waste

#131

Post by sitkack »

not2b wrote: post #110
Baeocystin wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. That's almost all due to food waste, though. FWIW. https://www.epa.gov/sustainable-management-food/sustainable-...

Yes, for that reason Santa Clara County (Silicon Valley) is pushing hard to divert food waste out of the garbage and get it composted instead: it's supposed to go in with yard waste, not the regular trash. Not sure how successful this is as it counts on people putting things in the correct bin.

Diverting compostables out of the regular trash stream also makes the regular trash stream not stink. My under counter trash bin can go two weeks easy without stinking up the place. It is mostly plastic that can't be recycled.

Re: Plastic-eating enzyme could eliminate billions of tons of landfill waste

#132

Post by hackernewds »

ars wrote: post #74
323 wrote: post #63

Dumb question, but if plastic eating bacteria starts spreading, wouldn't we all be in a lot of trouble? Will car plastic interior start to rot? Will PET soda and water bottles start decomposing in the grocery store, and will they require refrigeration to prevent that? Will our computer keyboards require new materials?

This is for an enzyme, not bacteria, but to answer your question bacteria still need water, so if you keep the plastic dry it should be fine even in such a world. PET soda bottles will be sterilized, then sealed. The outside is dry and won't decompose. You won't be able to re-close it and leave it out though. For things that need to stay wet, like drain pipes, you would add chlorine and use PVC which is unlikely to b…

After COVID always worry about humans engineering some sort of biological net new specialized entity.

Re: Plastic-eating enzyme could eliminate billions of tons of landfill waste

#133

Post by wanderr »

DANK_YACHT wrote: post #91
mschuster91 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the Western world maybe, but outside of it... hell even in the Western world we have regular reports of mismanagement and corruption, just look at Italy. We need to reduce the amount of trash we produce, not hope for a miracle technology.

Landfills are not a miracle technology. They exist already and are technologically sound. It’d be way more of a miracle if we somehow managed to greatly reduce waste.

Correct, landfills are not a miracle technology. Landfills leak.

https://www.clf.org/blog/all-landfills-leak-and-our-health-a...

https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs-040-03/

Re: Plastic-eating enzyme could eliminate billions of tons of landfill waste

#134

Post by bscphil »

zackees wrote: post #99
snek_case wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the main problem is that the average Joe/Jane confuses all types of pollution as equally bad. The real, most imminent threat is really CO2. That's what we have to spend the most money/energy on, because it could have absolutely catastrophic consequences in the next few decades. Plastic in a landfill is just... Stuck there. It's unnatural, sure, but it's not immensely harmful, not nearly on the same scale as C…

Quoted post unavailable.

> Also, the very premise that more CO2 is existential is contradicted by historical record: 250 million years ago earth was 15 degrees warmer than it is now and CO2 was a lot more abundant.

Maybe this is just a joke that sailed over my head, but this is obviously false and doesn't mean anything of the sort. Existential for whom? All you can definitely conclude is that the Earth won't explode if the climate increases by 15 degrees. You can guess that life would survive, but there were no humans back (or large mammals at all) back then. There's no reason to think we would make it.

> The people controlling the media won’t allow it. This is common knowledge.

This is just rank conspiracism. I know of no evidence to suggest that the media are somehow controlling events (?), laws (?), the "narrative" (?), simply to prevent nuclear reactors from being built. How? For what purpose?

And claiming "this is common knowledge"? Maybe that was just another joke, because normally when one says a conspiracy theory is true, one also claims that this is secret information that has to be carefully mined out of various data sources, because if everyone knows something is happening it's usually not a very good conspiracy.

Re: Plastic-eating enzyme could eliminate billions of tons of landfill waste

#135

Post by dimal »

> Recycling is the most obvious way to cut down on plastic waste.

I would think that the most obvious solution is to not use a material that lasts thousands of years for disposable packaging that’s only needed for a few months. Seems like these types of “revolutionary” new processes to make recycling finally work come out every year, and yet nothing changes. I can’t imagine this will be any different. As long as it’s cheaper to create new plastics than it is to recycle them, nothing will change.

Re: Plastic-eating enzyme could eliminate billions of tons of landfill waste

#136

Post by jrms »

DANK_YACHT wrote: post #104
candiddevmike wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most landfills contain icky things like heavy metals or arsenic. Having that leak into an aquifer Would Be Bad.

That’s why they’re sealed with clay and plastic and constantly monitored for leakage.

If it needs constant monitoring it's a potential problem... And at some point it will happen... We know that from ages of software development, if it can fail, it will fail at some point.

Re: Plastic-eating enzyme could eliminate billions of tons of landfill waste

#137

Post by salt-thrower »

hackernewds wrote: post #128
salt-thrower wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I generally assume that any headline with the structure "X new thing could solve Y," where Y is a massive problem that everyone wants a silver bullet for, is clickbait. I've seen too many of them at this point. Everyone wants a quick fix for climate change and pollution because it will absolve us of doing the hard work that the problem really requires. By all means, we should pursue such moonshot ideas - but…

This is a bit of a cynical take, if a solution is 1% likely it seems natural that 99% of the time the solutions aren't viable. Implies the 1% is still possible.

Cynicism is warranted for the reason that the other commenter pointed out: the fossil fuel industry (and by extension, any Big Industry) will use moonshot ideas like this as ammo for their PR machine. "Don't worry about our lobbying against viable solutions right now - soon we'll have this new silver bullet idea." That sort of thing.

But it's definitely worth exploring those moonshot ideas, so I'm not shutting that idea down. It's just good to be aware of how these sorts of headlines are used in the service of greenwashing.

Re: Plastic-eating enzyme could eliminate billions of tons of landfill waste

#138

Post by wanderr »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #106
j-bos wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or those of us who don't like microplatics in our fish, water, and bodies

Those microplastics aren't coming from landfills. They're coming from your everyday interactions with plastic and people dumping plastic in rivers and oceans.

Maybe not the landfills once they are buried. But certainly from waste transfer stations or unburied waste, seagulls and other birds will pick up trash because it smells like food or may have some food in it, and then drop it outside of the landfill/transfer station.

Re: Plastic-eating enzyme could eliminate billions of tons of landfill waste

#139

Post by kingkawn »

dimal wrote: post #135

> Recycling is the most obvious way to cut down on plastic waste. I would think that the most obvious solution is to not use a material that lasts thousands of years for disposable packaging that’s only needed for a few months. Seems like these types of “revolutionary” new processes to make recycling finally work come out every year, and yet nothing changes. I can’t imagine this will be any different. As long as it’s…

Regulation is the way

Re: Plastic-eating enzyme could eliminate billions of tons of landfill waste

#140

Post by cortesoft »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #129
peyton wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Breeder reactors produce more fuel than they consume.

Wouldn't that violate the second law of thermodynamics?

It isn’t creating more energy, it is just converting non-fissile material to fissile material

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor

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