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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

#261

Post by michaelmrose »

staticassertion wrote: post #236
michaelmrose wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make a disposable plastic container cost an extra dollar paid at time of manufacture. Double the cost every year. We will be 100% migrated by the end of 2023.

Companies will just pass the cost to the consumer, blame regulation, and keep using plastic because it's easier and there's nothing we can do to stop them.

You can just ban it after a phase out period where it is made progressively more expensive. If the choice is to spend $0.20 more on glass or try to pass $8 on to the consumer then the merchant will choose not to commit suicide.

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

#263

Post by zarzavat »

ars wrote: post #125
Supermancho wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can just trade one type for another types You cannot replace most oil-based fuel with incinerators. So I'll disagree there. The utility of oil-based fuels is the energy density in combustion. Burning plastic doesn't come close to the same exchange.

> The utility of oil-based fuels is the energy density in combustion. Burning plastic doesn't come close to the same exchange. The energy density of plastic (by weight, not volume) is virtually identical to that of oil. Yes, the machine used to burn oil vs plastic looks different, but coal plants can burn plastic without much modification - and they would be much much cleaner than coal when they do so.

We don’t burn oil though. We burn natural gas, in highly-efficient turbines. Burning oil and coal is obsolete technology that we are trying to phase out.

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

#264

Post by seunosewa »

Auracle wrote: post #189
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…

Sperm counts have been dropping for a long time (50%-60% over the past 50 years) without stopping, and plasticizers are the suspected culprit. It's incredible how many people need to do IVF now. I would argue that might be the most imminent threat but nobody seems to care.

The need to do IVF is also related to women marrying and choosing to have children later.

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

#265

Post by bregma »

bluSCALE4 wrote: post #253

This is cool and all but I really worry about this going out of control. Just like trees had nothing to eat them, right now, plastics don't either. All of our infrastructure relies on plastic so if that suddenly starting getting compromised, we'd be royally screwed.

Coming off a global pandemic it is good to know that a self-replicating microbe capable of destroying much of our infrastructure in a short time has been found in the wild.

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

#266

Post by air7 »

Plastic sitting around is a landfill is just unsexy carbon capture.

I'm no expert but given the excess of carbon in the air, it's not out of the question that a viable way forward is actually using more light plastic materials, not bothering with recycling or alternatives (when these are not cost/energy effective), and just putting it in big holes where they will presumable stay unscathed, until (maybe) some day it would be worthwhile to dig them out and reuse the carbon. The whole life cycle is generally carbon neutral, and might even offset more energy demanding alternative products.

I feel that the general aversion to plastic is due to problems that arose more from waste mismanagement that caused the Great Pacific Garbage Patch for example, and not necessarily from the lifecycle of the products themselves.

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

#268

Post by usrusr »

ars wrote: post #71
wang_li wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do we want to put the plastic's carbon into the atmosphere instead of back into the ground where it came from?

Because then we can avoid pumping oil out of the ground and burning that. The hydrocarbons are going to get burned one way or another, you can just trade one type for another types.

Even more to the point: we can avoid digging coal from the ground, which burns even dirtier than plastics trash.

And even in the lofty goal end state of zero fossils, if it's not a complete collapse back to medieval tech (and population numbers), we would likely end up with biomass based plastics serving as packaging and the like at the upper end of that carbon's energy slope, before utilizing the remaining bound energy in an incinerator.

Biodegradable properties of grown plastics are only a last line of defense against pollution when collection has failed.

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

#269

Post by staticassertion »

franga2000 wrote: post #250
staticassertion wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies will just pass the cost to the consumer, blame regulation, and keep using plastic because it's easier and there's nothing we can do to stop them.

I used to think like that too, but in many fields, there is a huge pressure against "passing it on" because of some producers that optimise price over everything else. If your only competitive advantage is being cheaper than the rest and now everyone is raising prices, doing the same will not only hurt your appearance as the "reliable value brand", but you'll be wasting a huge opportunity to grab a big new chunk of t…

Bag taxes are already passed on to customers though.

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

#270

Post by petre »

antupis wrote: post #255
andrepd wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> at least where I live, I've seen a big push for the reduction of of single use plastics, both through legislation, savvy consumers and responsible supermarkets Have we? Or have we just seen campaigns and legislation against plastic straws and supermarket bags, which amounts to mere virtue signalling and greenwashing by corporations and governments? We need to do much better than ban plastic straws and advertise how…

Those non plastic straws are just horrible, EU ban is just punishing customers.

There are some PLA (polylactic acid) straws that are borderline acceptable, but they're only legal in some states.
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