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Comment by ars | Hacker News Reader

It makes sense that eventually things would eat plastic.

Lignin (wood) and cellulose are pretty tough to break down, but there are things that eat them.

Plastic fundamentally (chemically) is made of the same stuff as wood, just in a different arrangement of atoms, and releases energy when decomposed. So it seems quite reasonable that there would be things that can eat it.

I think the plastic pollution we are seeing right now is a temporary thing - soon enough there will a large enough population of plastic eaters that it will no longer be a problem.

(We should avoid plastics that have chlorine in them though, except where needed. PVC is the most common example of a plastic like this.)

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These caterpillars didn't evolve to eat plastic as far as we know. Evolution takes place on unimaginably slow timescales. It took tens of millions of years for things to evolve to eat wood. Probably these caterpillars already happened to produce a chemical that reacts with plastic. I wonder if they even get any nutritional value from it.

That said, bacteria can evolve pretty fast because of high population sizes and low generation times. In the 50's they found a bacteria that had evolved to digest the synthetic material nylon. I wonder why bacteria haven't evolved to digest plastic yet. Possibly there is some scientific reason that it's inefficient to digest. Maybe we could speed evolution up by dissolving plastic in a liquid first so it's more accessible to them.

There was actually a bacteria isolated last year which digests PET plastic: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6278/1196

I forget where I heard or read this but for something like millions of years wood and other plant materials was not broken down by anything at all as there were no animals to eat away at them.

That's the carboniferous period! [1]

And it went on for about 60 Million years which seems an unfathomable timespan.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous

yeah, imagine all the dead trees that basically don't decompose because nothing can eat them. that'd be a sight to behold.

It actually wasn't the trees it was mostly their bark!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous#Rocks_and_coal

So it wasn't mountains of wood that lay on the ground during the Carboniferous period, it was like, the best mulching job ever. The trees pwned all other species at that time. Can you imagine being a weed trying to grow up through all that bark? You'd have one hell of an up-hill battle!

I'd evolve growing on the bark itself, given that the nearest soil was a few (dozen?) meters below. See also anything that grows on bare concrete :)

The atmospheric oxygen was 35%. Everything was on fire!

I think of a blender. Eventually something is going to be found that breaks up pesky combos.

Long molecule chains in plastics seem like they would be easy. I guess it takes the right blender to chop it up!

I also imagine a small caterpillar-sized blender involved. Now I need a smoothie.

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