Engineered microbe may be key to producing plastic from plants | Hacker News Reader

Engineered microbe may be key to producing plastic from plants

phys.org

41 pointsdnetesn18 comments

Since the current three top-level comments are all the exact same environmental complaint, all without having actually read the link, here are the relevant quotes:

> In the course of its digestion process, the microbe turns those aromatic compounds into 2-pyrone-4,6-dicarboxylic acid—more manageably known as PDC.

> It would be an attractive plastic alternative—one that would break down naturally in the environment, and wouldn't leach hormone-mimicking compounds into water

Would be nice to find the microbe that converts plastic to plants.

Not exactly that, but there are fungi that break down plastics. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.sierraclub.org/sierra/fungu...

Here's an overview of some organisms that might be able to digest plastic, and some of the hurdles that will have to be overcome for real-world use. https://cen.acs.org/environment/sustainability/Plastics-recy...

Believe it or not petroleum will run low and become very expensive some time in the future. Clever technology has just pushed that date out to mid century. Petroleum is the main source of plastics and many chemicals. You might alternatives when crude oil reaches a thousand dollars a barrel.

As fossil fuel use winds down, that date will be pushed much further into the future. After all, to keep global warming below ~3 degrees centigrade, we'll have to avoid burning most known oil reserves.

What % of crude oil can be converted into plastic anyways?

Looks like fiber-plastic plantations from Hyperion is becoming a reality.

More plastic? Should we not try to figure out how to engineer microbes to ingest micro plastic and return something biodegradable?

I mean, it kind of said that in the article?

> It would be an attractive plastic alternative—one that would break down naturally in the environment, and wouldn't leach hormone-mimicking compounds into water

At least for PET some bacteria exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PETase

More plastic ? Is there a shortage of plastic that I missed ? It would be a much more exciting news if someone managed to convert plastic to biodegradable material.

Read the article until the end, in the last section it says that plastic produced by this method is would break naturally in the environment.

Yes I read that. But what about the plastic that are already in the world ? I think that a way getting ride of that would be a much more exciting discovery.

Let's not cut off our face to spite our noses ... despite our efforts, demand for plastic isn't going away anytime soon; so if we can start producing better plastic, that would at least mitigate one half of the equation.

Perhaps it would, but surely the first step of fixing that is to stop adding to the problem, in millions of tons a year?

If there's a plant derived alternative with most of the benefits without the major downsides we could start reducing, perhaps to near zero, the amount produced from oil. That seems like a pretty significant and exciting discovery. A possibility of plastic that degrades gracefully and doesn't linger in the environment. Even if we're left with some specialist uses that must still come from oil it's world changing. For once, world changing for the better.

Hopefully we will also find a way to get rid of all the oil derived plastics already out there.

Uses wood based plants hmm.. and no method if the resulting plastics are biodegradable to address our pollution problem. Still removing even more dependence on oil would be nice.

> It would be an attractive plastic alternative—one that would break down naturally in the environment, and wouldn't leach hormone-mimicking compounds into water

I missed that part.

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