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Comment by Aloha | Hacker News Reader

I strongly suspect that within about 50-100 years something will evolve that can digest all of this plastic. Which will probably cause us as a society to move back to glass and metal as storage components.

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"within about 50-100 years"

That's how bottlenecks work, but not evolution. No species is going to evolve in the next century which will be able to suddenly break down plastic and turn it into energy/nutrients.

The ones that do, mostly bacertium and fungi, were pre-disposed to doing so, and didn't suddenly X-men their way into consuming plastic.

As for organisms such as the Chinese mealworm that "eats" plastic bags, jury is still out about whether it's actually chemically converting the plastic or merely biting it into smaller bits.

> No species is going to evolve in the next century which will be able to suddenly break down plastic and turn it into energy/nutrients.

Such a species already exists: https://www.sciencealert.com/new-plastic-munching-bacteria-c...

There are also bacteria that can break down nylon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nylon-eating_bacteria

I don't understand why people are so dismissive of ideas that are a simple google search away.

The sentence after the one you quoted referenced the species that already exist.

> The ones that do, mostly bacertium and fungi, were pre-disposed to doing so, and didn't suddenly X-men their way into consuming plastic.

Not to be a smartass, but I don't understand why people read a post to the first sentence that upsets them then instantly reply without reading the rest.

The plastics that are broken down by bacteria have side groups or chains that make it feasible to attack them chemically.

Now the question is if something can break down PTFE.

You obviously did not read my post all the way through.

There is a good chance a species already exists that can break down plastics along with whatever else its actual diet is. We would be giving it an environment to flourish.

Species can evolve very fast - in this experiment from a couple years ago E. coli evolved from minimal antibiotic resistance to almost immunity in about 100 days:

https://www.sciencealert.com/watch-this-amazing-video-shows-...

I strongly suspect there’s a speed difference between evolving to survive a newly-hostile environment and evolving to take advantage of new opportunities to thrive.

Something similar to that happened when fungi evolved the ability to break down lignin.

http://feedthedatamonster.com/home/2014/7/11/how-fungi-saved...

50 to 100 years is a very short time.

For millions of years, nothing had the capability to eat dead plant matter. See the carboniferous period.

Why do you strongly suspect this?

Well for one, bacteria already exists that eats plastic: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6278/1196

It's not too far fetched to assume this already-existent bacteria could continue to exist and possibly mutate into something more efficient or proliferate to encompass the entire ocean.

We should genetically engineer this new breed of bacteria and seed the oceans. What could go wrong?

Neat!

No high quality source of hydrocarbons goes unexploited for long.

The carboniferous period lasted 60 million years. We probably have some time to work with.

Locked away in geologically stable layers in a time of cataclysmic climate change. Maybe there's something to that and the oceans will acidify too much for bacteria to evolve to eat the plastic, and there will forever be a "plastic layer" in the geological record to mark this era.

I was thinking more that the plastics in question are free-floating in a soluble medium and thus ripe for digestion by an opportunistic microbe.

I think you mean the "biosphere" rather than "we". Modern humans have existed anywhere from 50k-200k years. Just to put the time scales into context.

EDIT: Just to clarify: As long as disasters happen slowly enough and there are actually local maxima for the species to evolve "into", everything may be fine for "humans"... but those assumptions may be overly optimistic.

He kind of has a point.

There are mutations in microbes all the time that allow plastic digestion, probably millions every day.

Only needs one that really punches through.

And then spreads to eat all the plastic food containers in my kitchen.

And we'll create plastics that are plastic-eater resistant...

Like metal, or various wood fiber based products.

Dwindling oil reserves might actually cause us to switch to plant based plastics (hopefully engineering (slowly) bio degradable ones) or the above mentioned 100% recyclable streams sooner.

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