151–160 of 294 posts
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Yes , it does. Burning plastic without somehow accounting for that is a terrible idea.
Is there a way to mitigate this, or make use of the waste gasses?
> 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…
Right now the only solution is to minimize plastic use as much as possible. Please keep this in mind.
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Nuclear fuel must first be mined, correct? That's not renewable and could offset the benefits somewhat. That said I imagine it may be better as a base load than dirty coal.
Nuclear waste is also extremely compact.
Unfortunately our world is not run without the consumption of resources. There are trade offs to everything.
The designed enzyme sequence
>contains five mutations compared to wild-type [1]
In this case, the enzyme used as the starting point for engineering turns out to need only a few small changes to improve its ability to efficiently depolymerize PET.
Choosing which of those small changes to make is the aim of the machine learning algorithms the authors used. The authors provide a visualization of exactly where those changes are inside the protein on their website
>Interactive visualizations of MutCompute for Fig. 1 are available at https://www.mutcompute.com/petase/5xjh and https://www.mutcompute.com/petase/6ij6
Depends on what the waste products are and how they are captured, otherwise you trade one problem for another. The plastic takes up space but if it's in a landfill you have carbon capture, best not to release that carbon into the air as CH4 or CO2.
I understand that the pits, that are the foundation of landfills, are lined with impermeable plastic sheets. Their purpose is to avoid ground-water contamination. So, there may be some redesign of landfills required before this technology can succeed.
I’m not sure if HDPE would make a good liner material or not, but just as an example, the differences in molecular structure between PET and other plastics are big enough that it would take an array of different enzymes to eat them all.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyethylene_terephthalate 2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyethylene
This is BS "could" does not mean "will". We get these types of articles every so often but I've yet to see any of it come to anything. My suspicion is that this research gets amplified by PR firms that service the plastic industry with the idea that the public will feel better about all the plastic that is being thrown into the environment and landfills. Right now the only solution is to minimize plastic use as much…
This is BS "could" does not mean "will". We get these types of articles every so often but I've yet to see any of it come to anything. My suspicion is that this research gets amplified by PR firms that service the plastic industry with the idea that the public will feel better about all the plastic that is being thrown into the environment and landfills. Right now the only solution is to minimize plastic use as much…
with the idea that the public will feel better about all the plastic that is being thrown into the environment and landfills.
Personally, I don't think it's anywhere as much of a problem as the environmentalists claim it is either. Much like the biomass from long ago which has become the oil of today, I'm pretty sure the plastic waste of today will simply become the oil of the future.
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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…
Garbage is also a problem in the environment like plastics in oceans, but the problem is not enough (well run and used) land fills (in Asia) not too many!