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Comment by gdfasfklshg4 | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that the plastic straw will still be polluting the environment in 10,000 years. Getting macro plastics out of the environment is difficult getting microplastics may be impossible. At some point we have to accept that single use plastics have an environment cost that is totally unacceptable.

As for emotive press stories about dead animals being the only reason people care. Did you know that the average human meal contains microplastics now? That your body contains microplastics right now?

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CO2 also pollutes the environment for thousands of years.

"About 50% of a CO2 increase will be removed from the atmosphere within 30 years, and a further 30% will be removed within a few centuries. The remaining 20% may stay in the atmosphere for many thousands of years." --IPCC AR4

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/03/how-lo...

Plastics are a visible but small part of our environmental damage. Plastic straws doubly so.

There are natural processes that remove CO2. There are no natural processes that break down plastics to a safe form.

EDIT: To be clear I am not saying that it is harmless to release lots of CO2 I am saying that we can't compare pollutants by simply looking at the gross tonnage released.

Hopefully, in the timescale of 10,000 years, we'll have refined plastic eating bacteria and the like to get rid of microplastics. It makes more sense to worry about a 20-100 years timescale.

Bacteria evolve fast, and hydrocarbon-metabolizing bacteria are already known, e.g.:

https://aem.asm.org/content/77/22/7962

I expect they'll be common well before 10,000 years. It's certainly an easier problem than getting CO2 out of the atmosphere.

How is hoping that whole new species evolve and spread without changing ecosystems even remotely an easy problem?

Because those species already exist and we are changing the ecosystem (by introducing micro-plastics everywhere)?

My point is that changing ecosystems will have unforeseen consequences...

Once we have plastic eating bacteria plastics will serve no useful purpose. Imagine your laptop rotting...

That's unlikely. Microorganisms break down wood too, and we build houses out of it!

Typically all you need to do to keep microorganisms from eating something is keep it dry. We tend to do that for laptops anyway.

And plastic food packaging?

Should probably be abolished anyway. But as long as the outside was dry, and the inside didn't have plastic-eating organisms, then it would still work.

Besides, the assertion wasn't that plastic would still be useful for everything. It just wouldn't be useless.

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