Production, use, and fate of all plastics ever made [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Production, use, and fate of all plastics ever made [pdf]

advances.sciencemag.org

39 pointsluu13 comments

I was literally just thinking about this problem. At some point in the future, as alternatives such as hemp-based composite bioplastics become available. The entire environment will have to be "de-polymerized" manually. Rather than simply releasing an engineered enzyme into the wild and allowing degradation to occur in situ. What would be the drawback of simply creating a global fund for actual human cleanup at scale? With some set incentivizing price for retrieval, say $0.01 per gram?

> What would be the drawback of simply creating a global fund for actual human cleanup at scale? With some set incentivizing price for retrieval, say $0.01 per gram?

I'm imagining huge machines trawling the landscape, chewing up beaches and scouring forest floors, controlled by bots that automatically guide them to the nearest plastic recycling depot where they disgorge their contents and then move on. They'll be powered by burning plastic and will thus be self-sufficient, albeit enveloped in toxic clouds of pollution. Occasionally one will lose Internet connectivity and rampage through a small village in the developing country in which it operates (deployment in Western countries will be prohibited), obliterating shanties and the occasional elderly person, baby, or otherwise slow-moving human being.

A environmental cost benefit analysis was most likely done before the outcome you outline so succinctly.

The machine clean-up proposal - once appropriate lobbying efforts by the corporation making the profits occurred - flew through Congress with only a token protest vote.

"To clean the village we had to destroy it!" he said, wiping his brow. Nods of agreement and approval all around.

You mean “cleanse the village”?

I am more than a little frightened that many would find this an acceptable solution.

Sounds like a setting for a novel.

Gaming the fund with other sources of extremely cheap plastic, such that no cleanup occurs, all to extract cash from the fund until it's completely drained.

Non-degradable plastic should be taxed to the point where alternatives are preferred for single uses, such as bubble wrap and straws.

60 Minutes last week ran a segment on a biodegradable plastic, but no mention of whether it was catching on or not.

How expensive does oil have to get before it becomes economical to dig up landfill to recover and crack hydrocarbons from old plastic?

Life would end on earth before that happens :(

Food for thought- crude oil extracted from earth is being spread all over the earth in the form of plastic and air particle, and is the cause of all forms of pollution that we know of today.

All forms? What? What about mining, refining, manufacturing, combustion of everything other than oil, littering, runoff from landfills, discharge of sewage?

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