Hacker News Reader

Comment by ArtWomb | Hacker News Reader

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?

View on HN

> 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com