Bugs are evolving to eat plastic, study finds | Hacker News Reader

Bugs are evolving to eat plastic, study finds

e360.yale.edu

414 pointsachenet288 comments

"The first bug that eats plastic was discovered in a Japanese waste dump in 2016. Scientists then tweaked it in 2018 to try to learn more about how it evolved, but inadvertently created an enzyme that was even better at breaking down plastic bottles. Further tweaks in 2020 increased the speed of degradation sixfold.

Another mutant enzyme was created in 2020 by the company Carbios that breaks down plastic bottles for recycling in hours. German scientists have also discovered a bacterium that feeds on the toxic plastic polyurethane, which is usually dumped in landfills."

Would love to see the timeline and capacity plotted on a chart. I wonder how much we need to make it practical. 6x increase in 2 years but did we go from decades to years?

Hours on bottles sounds like we are getting there in speed but how much bacteria, and how quickly do they multiply and what do they do once they are done? I am asking because breaking bottles down in hours doesn't sound "promising", it sounds like we are there. Just pour that on the plastic island in the ocean! If we cannot, there must be something else going on that prevents us.

I would be very wary of the unintended consequences of just releasing such a thing into the ocean…

Yup! those fiberglass boat hulls? dissolved in hours!

Fiberglass is not plastic. It’s glass, bonded by epoxy resins. I guess epoxies are a kind of plastic, but they’re completely different chemicals than the polymers typically used in plastic items, and so likely would be immune to enzymes in question.

Unless the bugs evolve, but it's not like they have a track record of that /s

If they're completely different chemicals, then it's just as likely that one of the many bugs already in the environment will evolve to eat epoxy. The plastic-eating bugs wouldn't have any particular advantage.

Maybe not the fiberglass… but those bugs might eat all kinds of other plastic.

I mean could you imagine bacteria in the wild that enjoys snacking on PET, polypropylene or ABS? Society might literally crumble!

There are so many plastic water pipes and buried cables

Plenty of fiberglass uses polyester resin rather than epoxy.

And then the ocean water and plastic-eating enzymes make their way into the fresh water supply, dissolving plastic pipes and appliances everywhere. Sounds like a J. G. Ballard novel.

PVC and ABS are used in water pipes, PET is used in bottles. It seems unlikely that these bacteria would have the ability to break down 3 completely different types of ‘plastic’.

HDPE is used in both plastic bottles and freshwater plumbing (under the name PEX).

From the Wikipedia page on PEX (Cross-linked polyethylene)

> It is also used for natural gas and _offshore oil applications_, chemical transportation, and transportation of sewage and slurries.

So yeah, a bacteria capable of dissolving that shouldn't be released anywhere near an offshore oil pipeline.

Tyvek is also polyethylene.

Life ... uh - you know the rest

Even widespread destruction of any one of those would cause massive destruction to humanity as machines, pumps, pipes, water plants, sewage plants, transportation systems, and more fail. Water touching plastic components are everywhere.

I suppose plastics are a bit like antibiotics. The more we use it, the more nature will adapt.

On the other hand, we probably still have decades, if not hundreds of years, before we see the full effect. Plenty of time to prepare alternatives that doesn't carry a usable form of energy inside.

Maybe something like this?:

https://zoltek.com/carbon-fiber/what-is-oxidized-fiber/

It's a good thing evolution is a myth /s

> It seems unlikely that these bacteria would have the ability to break down 3 completely different types of ‘plastic’.

FTA: "The research scanned more than 200 million genes found in DNA samples taken from the environment and found 30,000 different enzymes that could degrade 10 different types of plastic."

Right - presumably those 10 different types of plastic are broken down by different enzymes among those 30,000, which are found in different genes among those 200 million.

"my name is Alice"

Maybe.. not a terrible idea. It would get rid of plastic which is probably both the best and worst thing we have created.

Not to mention what the bacteria produce as a byproduct of digestion. Do they excrete C02? That would acidify and carbonate ocean water. Do they consume 02 as part of their digestive process? That'd suck oxygen out of the water.... Yes-- I would agree with - be vary wary indeed.

If they are carbonating the ocean water, then that'll go just fine with all of the "mountains" of sea grass sugars from the recent post on the subject. We're well on our way to making the oceans into soda water. Yet another example of the prophecies Idiocracy foretold.

How will we add the caramel color?

Oil spills.

Boil the ocean. Then the mountains of sugar will turn to caramel naturally, providing the desired color.

I thought vaporizing oceans was only when trying to communicate with whales from space.

That's what the floating teapot is for. Every whale loves a cup of Earl Grey.

But notably, not every bowl of petunias. “Oh no, not again.”

CO2 would probably be one of the better byproducts

You are exactly mentioning it, and the concern is ridiculous as almost every non-plant thing excretes CO2 and breathes oxygen.

Well, local unfettered growth can definitely cause local environmental problems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutrophication

Yeah. Although I didn't explicitly state it, this is what I was implying. For example, could plastic-eating-bacteria "super bloom" in a plastic rich localized area of the ocean - suck up all the oxygen with it's bloom and kill off competing species of fish, plankton, etc... causing food chain disruptions? Could a localized super bloom acidify a localized coral reef with the C02 byproduct?

I'm no ecologist or scientist, so I am not saying that it necessarily would happen, but we should think through these things as a matter of due-diligence before proposing that we toss this stuff in the ocean at scale.

What makes you think that the researchers would not also be investigating for unexpected and potentially dangerous side effects before "toss[ing] this stuff in the ocean at scale"?

And, you know, for better or worse, we really rely on plastic for, well, pretty much everything. If we can no longer trust it to do things like safely transport medicine, we’re gonna be in real trouble.

Medicine, and food of all kinds, but especially shelf-stable foods, the sort that are really handy after a natural disaster.

First of all, anything that is reasonably dry usually stays reasonably safe against bacteria. Unless the bacteria learns to combine oxygen with the hydrogen from the hydrocarbons to form their source of humidity, I think these should be relatively stable, still.

And we still have the option to store things in metal containers, like cans if we need that extra durability.

But under humid conditions, if bacteria become able to consume plastic the way they can consume organic matter, I would be even more concerned about regular grocery wrapping. Not only could the wrapping break, one could also get half-digested toxic materials into the food itself.

How about good ol' recyclable and washable and sterilizable glasswares?

Sure. These are, 10-100x more expensive per use? Making the medicine available only to top 1% of population sounds like a good deal.

Here in Europe water costs a couple cents more in a glass bottle than in a plastic bottle. Is packaging really a major cost driver for medicine?

I'd be willing to bet that glass bottle still has some plastic. Like the seal for the top, or the top itself.

But that's still reduces the plastic use to what, 1% of a plastic bottle? 99% savings sounds pretty good to me.

Agreed, but that 1% is very important to the integrity of the bottle. Without it, the bottle might as well be unsealed completely.

If plastic didn't exist, there would be much more demand for glass and in return a much higher price.

They are also heavier, less robust, more rigid, harder to seal tightly (without plastic), and completely impractical for large-ish items like some food items. Plastic-wrapped bananas are craziness, but a huge lot of our amazing level of food safety depends on plastics, so we can expect getting sick from food a lot more in a post-plastic world, like we used to before the advent of almost-free plastic wrappers.

I don't remember getting sick from food because it was wrapped in paper. And we still don't really know what all the hormone-like substances and microplastics leaching into our food do as a whole.

10-100x more expensive is still cents. When I lived in a third world country plenty of medications were sold in glass.

What is the CO2 impact of producing glass vs plastic? Of collecting and recycling?

Glass has a lot of good properties but it takes a lot of energy to melt the sand and mold into shape.

It almost certainly consumes O2 and excretes CO2, which might actually be worse than just letting the carbon be trapped in plastic in a landfill.

Indeed. And humanity is not even benefiting from the energy released, as is the case in an incinerator generating electricity or heat.

#justMakeAnotherOrganismThatEatsTheByproducts

There is not enough plastic in the ocean to cause any significant effect on oxygen levels if it all combusted.

Shades of Andromeda Strain

Don't see why you couldn't supplement existing recycle infra till we understand it better.

TBH, I'm sure any company would jump to be the first to show off plastic eating bacteria. Even if it's kept in a clean room and only eats employee's soda bottles from time to time.

It would definitely open the door to more funding and research if hyped enough.

We just have to make sure we know exactly how it propagates and how to safely handle that like anything else.

Ideally you wouldn't want it to be a covid 2.0, of course. Something more like medical grade maggots that are engineered to never reproduce would suffice.

Life, uh, finds a way

- Jeff Goldblum's character in jurassic park

Michael Crichton: the guy who turned reddit-levels of understanding into books before there even was a reddit.

Hmm, I might suggest reading/watching Andromeda Strain to see how well "clean room" reacts to unkown foreign substance. How much plastic is used in proposed clean room that the bacteria will feast on to weaken the "well laid plans" of the clean room's designers before escaping into the wild?

Re-read my comment

> Something more like medical grade maggots that are engineered to never reproduce would suffice.

We do this sort of thing already quite a bit.

You could also make them unable to survive without some kind of cheap chemical liquid to suspend them in.

As far as I know, it's actually a bit difficult to make new organisms that survive outside a petri dish and can spread like an unstoppable plague.

And the dinosaurs in Jurasic Park were engineered to be only females.

I don't trust humans manipulating organisms at this level. We're too new at it, but I understand that you have to try things out. We all do it with code when we're learning a new language/framework/etc. However, we've all had code that was only intended to be a PoC that then gets released into production without being fully tested. That's when the issues are found. Some lab wants to monetize the thing they've spent years researching but not fully understood/tested and then we're all some scifi plot.

....and Jurasic Park was a fictional work, just like Andromeda Strain?

By the same author, at that.

Jurassic Park wasn’t real.

That was one of the major points of the novel (IMHO).

"What if ..." Something that Science Fiction is best at.

"Your Scientists Were So Preoccupied With Whether Or Not They Could, They Didn't Stop To Think If They Should." -- Ian Malcom (Jurassic Park)

Leaded additives to gasoline came to mind as one problem that needed to be halted sooner.

Leaded gasoline was NOT a scientific invention. Leaded gasoline was chosen by the bean counters because it was cheaper.

>reading/watching Andromeda Strain to see how well

But this is a fictional story, why would one use this to inform their perspective on anything?

Not all fiction is pure fantasy. Sometimes, the fictional work is from someone very smart and researched on a topic that comes up with a story that not only entertains but provokes a larger discussion on the topic. For example, Tom Clancy wrote about using an airplane as a kinetic weapon. Clancy was known for being very well researched on the topics he discussed. Too bad his plot device wasn't given more attention in the real world or the beginning decades of the 21st century might have turned out differently. From my understanding Crichton was known to have researched his topics as well.

Humanity ignore the thought discussions that ficitional work provokes at humanity's peril.

Why would you ever make a gorilla cage out of bananas?

It's enzymes the organisms are producing. You don't have to release the "bugs" (Bacteria, I assume? I don't love the writing here.) into the environment. You culture the bacteria and extract the enzymes for use in removing plastic from the environment.

Probably convert the trash dense parts of the ocean to sparkling water from the emitted CO2.

The most likely outcome is that the bacteria would be outcompeted by wildtype strains and fail to metabolize very much in the immediate term.

It's more likely we'd see this type of microbe used in a bioreactor style setup where plastic slurry and growth medium are fed in for decomposition.

Why would they be outcompeted? Other bacteria have no reason to multiply when they can't eat the plastic they happen to be on.

Because they're using energy making an enzyme that only produces a positive impact on fitness in the event plastic is the best food source in the area. In all other cases, a leaner genome that isn't wasting energy on a useless enzyme is reproducing faster.

Even if plastic is heavily concentrated in the environment, if plastic isn't very energetically favorable to decompose, the environment will ALSO need to have a dearth of other available resources in order for the enzyme to provide a fitness benefit.

And the microbe would tend to coexist with plastic, not eliminate it.

A good example of the situation is cellulose. Various animals can eat it. Yet trees continue to flourish for hundreds of millions of years since biological machinery to digest cellulose is very energetically expensive and slow.

That's a really bad example as plastics don't have defense mechanisms other than how hard they are to digest compared to other materials in the environment. Trees are alive and have multiple defenses.

Not a given. If you introduce this gene into the ocean You’ve essentially introduced this into the horizontal gene transfer gene pool. This is how microbes evolve for the most part. If this enzyme confers even the slightest advantage some microbes will start using it. I really don’t see what the problem is though, we introduced a substance other organisms can’t digest and now we are introducing tools they can use to restore the balance.

The fact that you don't see the problem _is_ the problem. Fucking with ecosystems using bar napkin math is not a thing we should entertain.

We are already fucking with ecosystems with all the plastic fishing nets we are dumping in the ocean, and the microplastics that are everywhere. Obviously we shouldn't execute plans without a solid analysis, but entertaining ideas that resolve the problems we create is the first step.

You’re fucking with the ecosystem by existing. We all do. In the end we can only make a best guess estimate of what the effects of our action can be. What’s clear is inaction isn’t an option.

I think though that the fact is that these biomes are evolving already means that irrespective of this research or its development, natural evolution is already responding.

If we stopped polluting tomorrow, which I wish we could, we would still need to get rid of the pollution already produced. If the natural biome is already responding, then that's a good thing.

Not really. The horizontal gene transfer pool is local - you'll find microsystems where the plasmid or gene segment is present, but unless the gene itself provides some fitness benefit to the host, it will be outcompeted in general.

You'd expect a tiny reservoir of the gene to remain in circulation in heavily plastic polluted areas with low nutrient density, but you wouldn't expect the gene to represent a gain of function phenotypic change to the general microbe population.

When these hybrids are initially created, they'd likely be created via transfected plasmids that produce a ton of the enzyme - the fitness downside for a bacteria to produce a non-mutated version of the plasmid would be phenomenally large.

In the same way that we can create little insulin factory bacteria, our little plastic enzyme bacteria are not going to turn the world into grey goo; they're literally parasitized and weaker than wildtype at existing in the wild. If they weren't, they'd be the wildtype.

If 'bugs are evolving to eat plastic' does that not mean that the bacteria that can metabolize plastic are outcompeting wildtype strains, not the other way around?

"A BIOLOGICAL TIME BOMB?

"In the shaft leading to the [ventilation] grille a mindless, groping mass of malodorous corruption was thrusting its way silently towards the surface. Buoyed up by bubbling foam it steadily rose. Single units in an obscene abrogation of normal order divided and made two. Two became four and four, eight. "

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2368220.Mutant_59

I'm thinking that if these become widely distributed on land, that it might be more disruptive. E.g., highway overpasses collapsing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Geofoam_bridge_overpass.j...

But, it might still be a net good, even if some earthworks projects must be redone with other materials, if we can get plastics out of the food chain.

A lot of the drawbacks of plastics in the food chain are theoretical right now. Not saying we won’t find out it’s a major problem, but detecting presence of something (which is what most press releases of plastic pollution are about) does not necessarily mean it’s toxic. I think we should study this first, and try mechanical cleanup instead.

Isn't the bigger unintended consequence that it makes plastic not durable any more? In some sense it's the wrong problem to solve. You want durability in a material but want a toggle (or condition change) to trigger an alteration in its property when you're done with it.

This might lead to a retro-futuristic look, with wooden TVs and laptops

Yes, I can't wait to hear that my car no longer works because all the plastic "rusted"

Stopping that will be harder than it would have been to stop covid from spreading.

I would rather see that carbon sequestered in a landfill or at least used in an incineration power plant. What is the point of just releasing the CO2 into the atmosphere with no benefit?

One possible use case would be to release it into the wild to break down plastics in the oceans. But I guess that requires a bit of validation first...

> What is the point of just releasing the CO2 into the atmosphere with no benefit?

opportunity cost.

Simply put the resources to try and otherwise aggregate, process, use the plastic may be better invested in other forms of sequestering.

I am personally not up to speed on the scientific evidence, but I've heard a lot of people are worried about microplastics in the ecosystem, especially getting into human bodies via the food chain. Breaking plastics down completely could potentially fix this.

And to me as an idealist taking the super-long view, I think a "leave as little trace as possible" approach to the environment is preferable to one where we keep creating and using something literally called a garbage dump.

Pumping oil from inside the Earth and then converting it into plastic and then into CO2 has a much bigger impact than putting the plastic into a garbage dump. The oil to make the plastic came from a hole in the ground. A garbage dump is a hole in the ground. You've essentially done nothing. If you decompose the plastic into CO2, then that has a major impact on the atmosphere.

The estimate I've seen is that 25 million tons of plastic are added per year. That much carbon is added to the atmosphere every 6 hours.

Plastic in the oceans is not a worrying amount of carbon, it's just a worrying amount of plastic.

Even if you burned every single kilo of plastic produced, that's still "only" 380 million tons a year, or about 4 days worth of CO2.

Perhaps we should put plastic in to the landfills, and not the oceans?

Absolutely, but if the choice is "burn" the plastic if you could (via an oxidative process like digestion, rather than combustion) in place in the oceans or just leave it there forever, then adding to the carbon in the atmosphere is not the thing to worry about.

This is a good point I hadn't thought of. One adjustment to your calculations is that the CO2 emitted from plastic would weigh over 2 times the weight of the plastic due to the additional oxygen atoms, but that doesn't change the calculus substantially.

A landfill also emits e.g. CO2 and CH3, it's not that it's a sealed process.

The CO2 is from decomposing food, not from plastic. The CH3 can be harvested, or it will breakdown on its own after a decade.

Well it will be from plastic once a hypothetical plastic-eating microbe makes it into the dump.

Also, what do you think CH3 breaks down into?

Oil deep underground somewhere in the middle of nowhere is not remotely close to landfills close to surface, next to understand waters and relatively close to cities

It is more efficient to burn the already refined petroleum product (plastic) than to dig up more unrefined petroleum products (crude) and put them to use

> What is the point of just releasing the CO2 into the atmosphere with no benefit?

To prevent other carbon from being pumped up from deep beneath the ground

What does break down really mean?

The plastic bottles must be shredded and held at optimal humidity/ph/temperature at least. Doubt any bacteria will ever be able to break down so quickly solid material in natural environment. Does not happen with wood and there was quite a longer evolution time available.

This is one of the things that bothers me about how PLA is marketed as biodegradable green plastic. Yes it can break down but the conditions for it are incredibly specific that only a handful of facilities exist to do that in.

It is 99% marketing, and until or unless there is a real economic incentive to actually deliver on that marketing it will continue to be legally possible but practically non-existent.

Well, plant cellulose has been around for more than 2 billion years, and it still takes an impressively long time for microbes to break it down.

> German scientists have also discovered a bacterium that feeds on the toxic plastic polyurethane, which is usually dumped in landfills."

Could that be used to strip polyurethane off of paintings, or would they attack the painting itself as well?

> “The next step would be to test the most promising enzyme candidates in the lab to closely investigate their properties and the rate of plastic degradation they can achieve,” said Zelezniak. “From there you could engineer microbial communities with targeted degrading functions for specific polymer types.”

John Todd has been working on ecologies (in a vat) that can process waste for over fifty years now. Among his accomplishments was developing an ecology that can break down DDT in a matter of weeks, instead of years. The main thing he does is drawing from all five of the major kingdoms together, and have them self-organize around the waste being processed. (https://www.toddecological.com/about)

With the self-organization, it's not always necessary to model and engineer everything.

You might already know, but the New Alchemy Institute journals and quarterlies have been made available in PDF form: https://newalchemists.net/publications/new-alchemy-1971-1991...

I am mystified why their "living machines" are not more popular.

Imagine this:

Monsanto patents a genetically modified bug that eats plastic, sells it to governments and recycling plants.

Then, once it gets into nature and it starts eating things that isn’t trash, monsanto patents a series of plastics that is resistant to this bug.

Increasing the price of plastic bags by 10x.

Repeat this whole cycle over and over again. It becomes an arms race of patented bug, then patented plastic.

I just watched the latest Love, Death and Robots on Netflix, and one of the shorts is about a Scottish farmer, and his rat problem. For some reason, that came to mind, when I read this.

There's also Watchbird by Robert Sheckley: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29579

I doubt it could really be any worse than how wood rots if you don't handle it properly.

That’s because there is no incentive to ‘artificially’ speed up wood decomposition right now.

With the right incentive and no thought on unintended consequences, it might happen.

You are probably right though.

This is insane and simply not realistic.

What's not realistic about it? Your garbage can and car are safe in the driveway because nothing eats them. Same for a lot of hose components like gutters now. Pipes too recently.

> Then, once it gets into nature and it starts eating things that isn’t trash, monsanto litigates all people on whose property the bug can now be found on for patent infringement and wins.

FTFY, based on their usual behaivour.

I hate when people get angry riled up over hypothetical scenarios that will not happen

I am neither angry or riled, and I hope people who read my comment don’t get angry or riled.

It’s just fun to think of the dystopian possibilities of new tech, even if the likelihood of it happening in some cases is very low.

This study from 2013 was a revelation about how plastic is colonized and metabolized (!) in the ocean:

"Life in the “Plastisphere”: Microbial Communities on Plastic Marine Debris"

Full PDF: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/branco2014/files/2014/...

First part of abstract:

Plastics are the most abundant form of marine debris, with global production rising and documented impacts in some marine environments, but the influence of plastic on open ocean ecosystems is poorly understood, particularly for microbial communities. Plastic marine debris (PMD) collected at multiple locations in the North Atlantic was analyzed with scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and next-generation sequencing to characterize the attached microbial communities. We unveiled a diverse microbial community of heterotrophs, autotrophs, predators, and symbionts, a community we refer to as the “Plastisphere”. Pits visualized in the PMD surface conformed to bacterial shapes suggesting active hydrolysis of the hydrocarbon polymer. Small-subunit rRNA gene surveys identified several hydrocarbon-degrading bacteria, supporting the possibility that microbes play a role in degrading PMD. ...

The pictures are striking. It really looks like the plastic is being eaten. The 2013 study only covered floating debris, though. High density plastics that sink to the benthic zone arrive in an environment with much slower biological turnover and different organisms than the near-surface environment. This current study is interesting in that it sampled enzymes from different ocean depths, not just the surface, and found elevated degradation signals even at depth.

There’s a theory that most coal comes from a period after plants evolved lignin (the substance that makes wood woody) but before bacteria and fungi evolved the enzymes to break lignin down. Perhaps something similar will happen with plastic.

That's been debunked. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1517943113

net zero information

No; "Devonian-to-Permian woods infiltrated with fungi and possessing damage consistent with white rot decay or other forms of fungal degradation of lignified tissue" means the original theory simply doesn't work.

Interesting. Their alternative hypothesis from the abstract:

> Rather than a consequence of a temporal decoupling of evolutionary innovations between fungi and plants, Paleozoic coal abundance was likely the result of a unique combination of everwet tropical conditions and extensive depositional systems during the assembly of Pangea.

Interesting. I guess that aligns well with how quickly we’ve seen bacteria evolve to digest plastics.

I had no idea! Is this definitive, or just another supposition?

"The occurrence of these substantial coal deposits 200 million years after the undisputed evolution of wood-rotting fungi sharply conflicts with the evolutionary lag model" seems pretty clear, as does the evidence of fungal decay in deposited coal.

In my view this is the most likely way microplastics will be removed from the ecosystem, as there is neither the collective will to clean it up nor will there likely be a way to clean it up through human intervention within a reasonable timeframe.

In a way, plastic pollution is like a rapidly growing and untapped market that could be taken advantage of by microbes. A whole microbial ‘industry’ could take hold to process the various types of plastics along with the waste products that are generated when broken down by other microbes.

It's nice that plastics/microplastics will be gone but it's still very concerning in terms of their plasticizers and other impurities/contaminants making their way into the food chain, as those are potential endocrine disruptors.

Also it’ll mean all of our non-waste plastic will be pretty useless, since the bacteria aren’t going to discriminate.

Not necessarily. They can still be infused with antimicrobial chemicals. The longevity of the plastic would then also be determined by those additives, since those would have their own half life too.

The humans better make collective will I guess. It’s our responsibility.

I really don't like plastic. I prefer to avoid it for any purchase where there is a practical non-plastic alternative. But, I have to say, if we had a bacteria that could rapidly digest most plastics, and spread "in the wild", it could have some catastrophic effects on our world's economy. Imagine everything in the public infrastructure that uses plastic, rotting within a year's time. It could be apocalyptic.

Easy. Invent a resilient plastic that the microbes don't like to chew. And start counting the money untill that plastic becomes the problem.

It would create a lot of tech jobs, though, as almost EVERYTHING needs to be re-invented.

Wood biodegrades, and yet we still build houses out of wood. It's not that wood rot is never a problem, but it's far from apocalyptic.

There is certainly a lot of possibility for bad outcomes, but it seems the potential upsides outweigh them. Wood furniture continues to be a durable option, and well-stored plastic likely would too.

It isn't necessarily apocalyptic, but we do a lot of things to address wood biodegrading. Paint, arsenic-impregnated wood, etc. If we didn't have any such measures, our use of wood would quickly be a problem.

Also, a lot of current uses of plastic have a built-in assumption that they don't degrade. We could adapt, sure, but it would be quite disruptive, and a lot of current uses would need to be changed/replaced.

It's be hilarious when these become widespread, and plastic will start rotting like wood.

hilarious and super convenient, assuming there are no side effects nastier than inhaling and ingesting plastic as we all inescapably do now

honestly sounds like a potential best case scenario

Yes! I can't wait for all my plastic keyboards/monitors/furniture/phones to start rotting.

I've got wooden furniture. It doesn't rot, because it's inside.

If plastic rotted like wood when exposed to the elements, that would be great.

Well, it would be great when we wanted to get rid of those items. It would be less great when we wanted to preserve those items, like the massive amount of goods and infrastructure that are constructed out of plastic. The insulation on power cables, for one thing, would be bad if it started rotting.

The already use PVC on cable insulation. If this because a problem then everything would switch to using that instead of a mix.

Also, I've seen nothing to indicate these enzymes can eat nylon, which is the most common insulation other than PVC.

Not exactly the same, but rats eating the power cables has been a problem with cars built in the last decade because of the switch to soy-based insulation.

https://www.thedrive.com/news/20878/rodents-are-feasting-on-...

Cars are largely plastic. They live outside. It would be interesting if say your bumper started rotting for instance.

They are plastic today because earlier they were steel and rusted. Thus the “rustproof undercoating” which some dealers offered. A mechanic said my 1990 Honda CRX was mostly rust after 6 years in the Northeast US.

Rust is an entirely different process though. You can mitigate it with sacrificial anodes, for example (that's how steel ships survive bobbing around in salt water).

It would be great in some ways, but it would also have enormous consequences. There is so much infrastructure that would need to be prematurely replaced -- so many consumer durables which will fail years or even decades ahead of their expected shelf lives.

I wouldn't be surprised at all if we were to start concocting additives with antimicrobial properties, which would probably be even worse for the environment while also preventing the beneficial function of post-use decomposition.

Or perhaps, our way of life changes and we live without a durable, non-biodegradable, lightweight, apparently-cheap material that enables a disposable, consumerist lifestyle.

You want to reduce the living standards of most of the human population?

Most outdoor plastic is PVC which is not susceptible to this.

> with antimicrobial properties

The Chlorine in PVC does that.

In general PVC is used where you want the plastic permanently, and HDPE is used for disposable plastic (and is edible to microbes).

So basically we are fine, and no need to change anything.

> I've got wooden furniture. It doesn't rot, because it's inside.

Also because it's treated.

Wooden furniture is not treated. You are thinking of pressure-treated lumber, which is not used for furniture, but rather for outdoor wood in contact with soil.

Staining is a treatment. So is waxing, or varnishing.

I’m sure some people leave their wood furniture unfinished but it’s certainly not the standard, and not how you make them last.

Completely untreated wood stored in a dry environment will last many years (hundreds? tens at least) without degrading. Look at woodworkers hoarding wood in basements, beams in old buildings, etc

Staining/waxing/varnishing is used to protect the surface from wear and tear or change aesthetics. A varnished table that has been worn through in areas can be sanded back and look like new. The wood under worn spots won't be noticeably different.

I've never heard someone in woodworking call finished wood "treated". That would be really odd, given that treated wood is a specific term of art.

Plainly oiled wood is pretty normal, and isn't going to do anything to protect against rot (because it doesn't need to indoors).

We often use plastic for things that need to be able to deal with environmental exposure, though, or to protect things that can't deal with that sort of thing.

Things like water-pipes and cable insulators would be especially problematic if they started rotting.

maybe it will compel us to build stuff that's more substantial, less deliberately disposable, and more easily repaired :)

As with wood, I think this will only be an issue for goods left in life-friendly environments (like outdoors). It seems unlikely that your monitor would rot on your desk in your climate-controlled house, just like the desk itself doesn't rot.

But the desk is also treated with various things so it doesn't rot, isn't it?

And woodbugs still eat old furniture.

Wood generally doesn't rot unless it gets wet. Wood is typically treated so that if it gets wet there is a mechanism to prevent fungi from eating it. Painting it, for example, causes the water to slide off the wood before the underlying wood can get wet. But even a tiny puncture of that paint will expose the wood to rot causing fungi that float in the air everywhere. Most wood already has rot causing fungi inside of it, all you need to do to activate it is add water.

Woodbugs are another water loving creature. No water, no problem.

Dry old furniture can last a millenia.

I've got a balcony who's floor is made out of wooden planks. It was varnished at some point, but the varnish is damaged in many places, how long before the wood degrades completely and is unsafe to stand on?

Usually the planks under a balcony are protected by the balcony itself, so they remain fairly dry, especially if there are drip flashings that redirect rain drips and rivulets away. Or, they may be pressure treated wood, in which case it's likely to outlast the building whether it gets wet or not. There might be a fascia board that is designed to take the rain and rot away, separated from the structural beams by a flashing, vapor barrier, standoffs, hidden paint/stain, or nothing!

Often the wood is treated with polyurethane...plastic.

Treated wood isn't really used for indoor furniture. It's for wood that would be exposed to a lot of moisture, e.g. wooden decks.

The obvious side effect I can see is that plastic will no longer be super-durable and plastic goods used outside may now start to "rot". It's an interesting problem we're creating for ourselves by failing to properly dispose of our trash.

How would you dispose of trash in a way that doesn't somehow expose it to microorganisms?

It doesn’t need to not be exposed to microbes at all, but rather just not reach a critical mass / density to become a viable and readily available food source.

Recycling and incineration come to mind, albeit impractical and environmentally harmful.

If it happens it's easily enough solved by using PVC instead. And interestingly most outdoor plastic, that's intended to last, is already PVC.

Regular non-chlorinated plastic doesn't last very long in sunlight, so it's already not used outdoors.

> The obvious side effect I can see is that plastic will no longer be super-durable and plastic goods used outside may now start to "rot".

When left outside, most plastic goods degrade after a few years of solar UV exposure. Not well enough to remove the plastic from the environment, but sufficiently degraded that it breaks and is no longer fit for purpose. Like an old plastic lawn chair that becomes brittle and eventually shatters when you sit on it.

Indoors things are different. But indoors, wood furniture and whatnot can last hundreds of years.

A different perspective is that rotting is the ecology's natural function for returning material back into the ecology for new life and new growth. We have suspended that process, so now the ecology is adapting to it.

Well, maybe we could have "rotting" plastic for stuff we dispose of anyway, and "durable" plastic engineered around these microbes that we use for stuff we want to keep around.

Or, maybe by then we could just rebuild whatever is rotting with our home 3d printer.

Be careful what you wish for. Semi-decomposed plastic flakes might prove even more harmful than microscopic plastic particles.

If somebody could descent from a time travel machine and show us new revolutionary technologies like "ceramic", "pottery", or "glass"...

Lots of species evolved to survive the cretaceous paleogene extinction event, it still doesn't mean you should go on throwing asteroids on people because eventually some mouse will survive and reproduce to eat the plant who survived and reproduced.

No. But it does mean not having a panic attack (not saying you are, just in general) and allowing psychopathic environmentalists to enforce ridiculous policy that, in aggregate, harms more than it helps. That nature evolves to give us a helping hand is an absolutely beautiful thing.

Some others have mentioned it, but it could honestly be a worse scenario if it ends up making it's way into our food because of it (more so than it already does).

Good point. In that case we should observe animals that we eat and know to eat the bugs exhibiting this behavior and see if there's a noticeable change in their biochemistry. Would be curious to what degree the composition of the plastic is broken down by the bugs digestive system vs. what lingers indefinitely.

Nature doesn't evolve in order to do anything. Evolution is not a helping hand it's a process, the hollowed out chronological pathways in the ocean of death. And what eats plastic might as well eat us, or our foodstuffs.

It is prudent to fear any invasive species.

> Nature doesn't evolve in order to do anything. Evolution is not a helping hand it's a process, the hollowed out chronological pathways in the ocean of death.

By that logic lizards and bugs didn't evolve to change their pigment defensively to avoid predators.

Easy on the pedantry, Francis.

George Carlin was right: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBRquiS1pis

In the world of wild imagination - I wonder if we will, at some point in the distant future, have an ethical obligation to continue producing plastic to stop some species of animals from going extinct.

Or will it be an arms race where we have to lace our plastic with pesticide to stop everything from being eaten the moment it comes out of the injection molding machine!

Not likely but it is fun to have a few minutes of wide eyed day dreaming.

Edit: Another thought - perhaps next to my organic compost I will have a plastic compost where I layer old clothing, cellphone covers, food packaging along with some coal tar or old motor oil to break down into a bin of ... hell I have no idea what.

> we have to lace our plastic with pesticide to stop

We already do that, it's called PVC, and the pesticide is just chlorine. Currently we do that to enhance UV stability, but it also works against microorganisms.

> Edit: Another thought - perhaps next to my organic compost I will have a plastic compost where I layer old clothing, cellphone covers, food packaging along with some coal tar or old motor oil

You are making the same mistake so many people make: Plastics are not all the same. Each one is different, and something that can break down one will not break down another. You can not combine them this way.

> to break down into a bin of ... hell I have no idea what.

Most of those things would break down into water and CO2. Unlike soil, or food, plastics don't have many types of atoms: It's mostly just Hydrogen, Carbon, and Oxygen. Plastics are very clean.

You would be better off burning all those, the end results (the waste) would be identical, but you could capture the energy, instead of letting it get wasted as heat.

Some plastics, like Nylon, have nitrogen, but there's very little. It would probably becomes ammonia and evaporate, or be released a nitrogen gas. Some, like PVC, have chlorine, which would also evaporate.

Basically: If you did have some magical ability to compost plastic, you'd end up with water, with some harmless gasses being released.

To compost my vegi cuttings and yard clippings is to allow critters to eat it and leave behind their waste. Compost of organic matter is not magic.

By the same reasoning if critters evolve to eat plastic then the plastic becomes compostable. At the end of a compost cycle we would have a pile of their poop. It wouldn't be magic it would be "Bugs are evolving to eat plastic"

I had to post the text because, it's just so good:

"And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, “Why are we here?”

Plastic… asshole.”

― George Carlin

I like George Carlin, but this is a comedy routine and not philosophical advice. It doesn't mean we should go around stepping on daisies because "screw daisies, destruction is WHY WE ARE HERE!"

It's comedy and it's asking a philosophical question. It can do both.

He has another bit about how we're not really concerned about saving the planet, we're concerned about making sure the planet remains a hospitable place for us to live.

Which, one again, is kind of a perspective shift. No, we cannot "destroy" the Earth, all we can do is fuck up our ability to exist on it.

Is this supposed to be some kind of new discovery?

No, it's supposed to be comedy.

If he mentioned that today he would be cancelled. Already I see people anxious that plastic is being somewhat degradable because it hurts their narrative that plastic = evil.

It's funny to me that we need to destroy more trees for a manufactured moral panic

What?

If he mentioned that today he would be cancelled. Already I see people anxious that plastic is being somewhat degradable because it hurts their narrative that plastic = evil.

It's funny to me that we need to destroy more trees for a manufactured moral panic

Carlin had a quote for you: "Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that".

Before someone says “that’s median, not mean”, remember average is an ambiguous term that can mean either.

Intelligence as measured by IQ has a normal distribution, which means mean and median are the same. So Carlin was right no matter what he meant.

I’d never considered that, makes sense! Thanks!

Oh good, you are becoming self-aware

Funny, I hate plastic but the thought has crossed my mind a few times also. Is this just part of nature that the world secretly wanted?

This article doesn't address microplastics. These enzymes degrade plastics, but what is left over? Does the problem of microplastics still occur such that the plastics only degrade to a certain size?

> Does the problem of micro-plastics still occur such that the plastics only degrade to a certain size?

Long polymer chains unravel, so my guess is that the product, depending on whether they're aerobic or anaerobic bacteria, would be carbon dioxide and water, or methane. Presumably smaller grains expose greater surface area and would be digested faster.

I spoke about the uncertainty around plastic pollution in this interview just the other day [1], and the wisdom that came to mind was George Carlin's on the role of humankind being here just to create plastic, perhaps so that some new life form can evolve [2].

[1] https://www.thisishcd.com/episode/andy-farnell-perils-of-e-w...

[2] https://youtube.com/watch?v=v3Yom-EuX0U

If you "eat" a plastic for energy what's left is water and CO2.

Cutting a plastic into microplastics actually consumes energy, so there's no way they are doing that.

The atoms in plastic are just Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Carbon. (Chlorine sometimes, but rarely.) If you burn, consume, degrade, whatever you like, plastic, all you can get is water and CO2.

The earth is going to return petroleum to the biosphere, and humans are a part of that process. We are the bacteria that eats oil.

The utility of plastic as a material that is very durable is a temporary state of affairs. As more of these microbes evolve traits that allow them to metabolize it, the utility of plastic will wane. It's primary selling point, as well as it's primary detrimental trait, is it's ability to withstand decomposition.

Climate change due to carbon dioxide is a part of this process. Returning sequestered carbon to the carbon cycle necessarily causes disturbances in balance for a time. In the end, what you wind up with is more biomass, or more specifically, biomass that once existed that is now being reintroduced.

Feeling somewhat vindicated vis-à-vis my middle school biology teacher after being belittled for asking whether this would happen.

Article is apparently about microbes and not insects (lol.) The author also uses the word "evolve" but is this really correct? Doesn't it literally take millions of years for evolutionary changes? IMO: what's happening is they're finding microbes that already had the ability to break-down plastic rather than microbes literally changing forms to be able to break-down plastic? Or can these kind of environmental changes really happen that fast?

Evolution doesn't take millions of years for fast reproducing microbes. Another example is Covid, we've already seen half a dozen evolutions (that we know about) within the past several years.

To add to this, evolution typically happens _all at once_. Change does take a very long time but most of that time is spent in statis: everything has found its niche and lives in an equilibrium.

Once the environment changes (such as by introducing a whole new kind of food) species can very quickly adjust to the new reality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium

The coal formations we exploit today were formed during 60 million years period in between the evolution of wood and bark, and the evolution of fungi and bacteria that could break them down.

I wonder if wood had other noxious effects on biology back then as our plastics do today. Perhaps not.

As others have pointed out, that theory doesn't hold water

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1517943113

The plot of a scifi book I read some years ago was a group of people wanted to destroy mankind but leave the Earth intact.

Their method was to unleash a virus that ate plastic.

Civilization ended because of our reliance on plastic.

Sounds interesting, is it Mutant 59? If so, I will try find a copy.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2368220.Mutant_59

Sorry, that's not it. I can't find it. It's a trilogy.

There's Ringworld too https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61179.Ringworld

Viruses could not possibly eat plastic, though, as they don't have metabolism. Would have to be bacteria or fungi.

The Guardian's version of the article contains an update correcting a misattribution. The study was published in mBio: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/dec/14/bugs-acr...

Just an FYI for anyone who's interested in tracking down the actual academic paper.

Was a bit disappointed by the absence of insects. Maybe fix the title to "Microbes" rather than "Bugs".

The usage of "bugs" to refer to microbes in the press release was quite confusing, although note that the study does cite work that found some similar plastic-degrading microbes in the gut microbiota of some insects:

> Certain species, such as larvae of Plodia interpunctella (waxworms), Tenebrio molitor (mealworms), and Galleria mellonella, were even found to have developed a flora that can degrade polyethylene (82, 83), polystyrene (84, 85), or both plastic types simultaneously (86). However, these organisms might have a highly adapted and specialized microbiome due to their direct exposure and breeding in specific plastic-contaminated habitats (82, 84), [...].

In 2001 scientists also discovered fungus that grows on compact disk's aluminium and polycarbonate layers.

https://www.nature.com/articles/news010628-11

While I’m happy to hear about good developments related with plastic waste, am I the only one worried about the implications of a plastic eating bug? We sort of depend on how he durability of plastic in our modern world. Or is this simply a non-issue?

You're not the only one. Not a fan of plastic, but we've come to depend on it heavily. Any remediation strategy has to be highly directed in its approach. Humans tend to be bad at applying the right level of precision to large scale problems, and the consequences could be very dire.

> The first bug that eats plastic was discovered in a Japanese waste dump in 2016.

That wasn't a bug! It was the bacteria Ideonella sakaiensis, if my Google-fu serves me right.

Maybe the whole article (meaning the title as well) is off?

The entire article talks about microbes. In the article's context, it's quite clear that bug is used in the colloquial meaning for that, as in "a stomach bug", not in the sense of insects or arthropods.

They're phrasing it that way for sensationalism.

To me, this sense of the word "bug" can only refer to diseases.

> The first bug that eats plastic was discovered in a Japanese waste dump in 2016.

In 2009, a Taiwanese high-school student (Tseng I-ching) discovered a bacterium that decomposes polystyrene [0]. I think she deserves credit for starting this field of research.

[0] https://taiwantoday.tw/news.php?unit=10,23,45,10&post=15307

At some point bugs will evolve to eat electricity directly.

After all, that's what the electron transport chain does in respiration. So just cut the food middleman.

That’s exactly what plants, algae, etc. do during photosynthesis. Photons are self propagating electromagnetic waves, just another form of electricity.

Does this mean our trash has been biodegradable this whole time and that 3000yr estimates were not accounting for evolution?

It's fascinating that evolution can occur so rapidly. Perhaps human genome editing will one day be required to help cope with novel externalities. Or, in some cases, maybe we'll get by with additional help from new enzymes.

I had not considered the evolution of new biological functions may not require the death of the organism.

I'm not convinced that it can happen so rapidly. My suspicion is that the bugs already had bacteria or fungi in their digestive systems that were able to break down plastic, but that capability was latent in the fungi. We only notice it now because it's a helpful ability. Bringing out a latent ability isn't really evolution.

That's unlikely, considering these kinds of plastics simply did not exist before. Famously, scientists were able to study in detail the evolution of the brand new capability for a group of microbes living in waste water from a factory to metabolize nylon, a completely artificial polymer with no natural analogue. Moreover, scientists were inspired by this to try replicating these conditions in a lab, with a brand new strain of bacteria. I think it took a few decades, but they eventually found that that strain, too, evolved the capability to metabolize nylon, despite the required enzymes definitely not being present ahead of time. Microbial evolution proceeds at blinding speed, so maybe you could argue this doesn't apply to insects, but insets also have pretty short gestation cycles and at least some species are clearly experiencing dramatic selective pressure due to human activity, so I don't think it's at all inconceivable.

I spent a few minutes googling around expecting the researchers or funding to have heavy ties to the fossil fuel industry. This seems like something created to make people feel less guilty and reduce social pressure on using less plastic.

But I didn't really find anything, so maybe a tiny bit of optimism is allowed.

The last phrase of the article is either a clue or a pretty good deception:

  Last week, scientists revealed that the levels of microplastics known to be eaten by people via their food caused damage to human cells in the laboratory.

Given the amount of microplastics humans consume, could humans one day evolve to eat and digest plastic?

Not humans that have access to conventional nutrients. There's no selection pressure to encourage that kind of mutation. There's less and less selection pressure in general, these days.

Indeed. So many things that would have killed off our ancestors are now surviable and managable today, it seems likely to me that we are probably "de-evolving" i.e. more and more undesireable traits are surviving and being passed along to our offspring.

Depends on evolutionary pressure. If it improves your chances of procreation and survival.

I'd guess we'd end up hosting bacteria that do that first. I think mitochondria themselves started that way with early cells.

It doesn't even need to be so intimate/permanent as our relationship with mitochondria, gut bacteria are just little mercenaries who are here to help with digestion. Maybe some of them will figure out plastic (although I suspect they'll produce some bad byproducts while doing so).

the bacteria really have an advantage with generation time and population and the lack of a society keeping the 'less fit' members procreating.

but maybe they'll get integrated into our gut biome since we do eat the stuff

> society keeping the 'less fit' members procreating

Society is part of the ecosystem within which fitness is determined.

It's possible but unlikely. There really isn't any selective pressure on humans to do this. It's much more likely that we will figure out how to handle microplastics before our bodies evolve to digest them.

What evolutionary pressure is giving an advantage to humans who can digest plastic? The article is talking about "bugs" as in microbes, bacteria. Not animals.

My first assumption would be lack of food

Cancer and other health issues that make you either die early or affect your health/lifestyle enough where it becomes more difficult to find a mate to reproduce with.

I would imagine the more probable scenario is that, if plastics truly have a deleterious effect on human health, as many people say, then we will evolve to have more plastic-resistant bodies. But this can only really occur if we incur so much damage due to plastic that it broadly effects our reproductive potential at a relatively young age--a very high bar, and at which point it is probably much too late.

It can work more subtly than that, but takes admittedly a much longer time. If being slightly more plastic tolerant give you a slightly longer reproductive window, then those genes will become more common. Simple as that.

Yea - the thing that a lot of comments seem to be missing here is that evolutionary pressure comes in the form of mass die offs of those unfit for the new environment. If some people just have a higher incidence of cancer when they're 40+ there will be essentially no evolutionary pressure unless it's socially enforced (aka eugenics which is a really bad idea).

I don't think we could possibly evolve fast enough to keep up with the rate at which we change the environment (downside to having giant brains -- we can change the world at an incredible rate, but our generations iterate at a glacial pace compared to, say, bacteria)

It could be more subtle than that. If someone feels depressed and low-energy, they're less likely to find a mate and reproduce, and less likely to be able to take good care of their kids.

There's no cause and effect like "my parents consumed a lot of plastic, so I will be able to digest them", if that's what you're asking.

For humans to evolve to be able to eat & digest plastics, we'd probably have to be in a situation where we'd die or be unable to reproduce if we didn't. There's probably been some interesting research around gluten/lactose tolerance that might be related (or maybe not).

> For humans to evolve to be able to eat & digest plastics, we'd probably have to be in a situation where we'd die or be unable to reproduce if we didn't.

That's really not how it works. If you get dumped into a desert you don't become able to eat sand.

You first need to luck out on the ability to digest the thing, before it can become an evolutionary advantage. Because we're so big and we evolve so slowly, the thing in question would have to be a micro-organism colonising our guts. But we consume so little microplastics compared to our size and the rest of our feeding that it's unlikely to happen.

There are much better odds for large seaborne life e.g. seabirds, as not only do they ingest a good amount of plastics (macro and micro both) it accumulates and becomes deadly as they can ingest pieces large enough that they can't excrete or vomit the bits, and it fills their stomach. Likewise sea turtles for instance.

Still not great odds though.

Rate of population evolution is proportional to generational turnover rate.

Microbes can cycle through generations in minutes. Humans these days 2-3 decades.

https://www.quora.com/Why-do-living-things-die/answer/Vas-Su...

Maybe not evolve, but perhaps bio-engineer? Brings to mind this awful story - people choose to evolve to eat anything, and it doesn't go well for all other life on earth:

https://windupstories.com/books/pump-six-and-other-stories/p...

We're not doing most of the digestion ourself, rather delegate it to bacteria. And bacteria are learning to do that - either the existing gut bacteria or new strains that we would collectively acquire.

We can already eat plastics, even if it is usually a bad idea.

Digesting them is another matter. For us to digest it ourselves is very unlikely, I think. Breaking down protein is already a big challenge for our stomachs without help.

Much better to get help, in the form of digestive bacteria with the right enzymes.

I believe this is how The Andromeda Strain escaped from the lab. Time to stock up on Sterno.

We’re eating plastic too. It’s just harmful. I wonder if we will ever encounter a gene expression where it isn’t.

What a neat idea. Maybe there is a future where plastic vitamins intentionally trigger desired hormonal responses.

Judging from the number of decades it's taken for organisms that reproduce on the order of hourly/daily to develop that capacity, I wouldn't hold my breath. We haven't even evolved the ability to digest wood, after all. But, we are cyborgs. One could imagine a probiotic treatment to introduce plastic-digesting bacteria to our gut flora within a decade.

A lot of kids eat paper. Maybe we'll get somewhere on that front one day. :)

I think it's more likely that the fungi in the bugs' digestive system have already had the ability to break down plastic, only it was latent and unnecessary until recently.

Paraphrasing title, bugs are evolving faster than humans… :-\

Well of course they are. A generation of bacteria is about 20 minutes, for human more like 20 years.

Microorganisms that eat plastics will be great at first, until hospitals see breakouts of them. At least with insects, outbreaks are far easier to prevent

they'll still need access to water. your table doesn't spontaneously degrade but its biodegrabable

Well, our world is made of plastic. If bacteria will eat plastic, we would have to make other uneatable plastic.

At this point humans are behind the curve. We should take this as a sign to adapt.

Bugs eat plastic, people eat bugs, people make plastic. It’s the circle of life.

Awesome, proof once more man is not at the pinnacle of evolution.

Great. Now all we need is one that breathes in CO2.

I for one welcome our plastic eating overlords.

/me starts wearing non-plastic clothing

You are exactly mentioning it

maybe we can engineer humans to eat plastic

Maybe a 1000 years from now, everyone will have gut bacteria capable of digesting plastic, with no change needed to the actual humans.

mind the gray goo please.

Living in the Plastic Age.

Annoying this uses the word "bugs," which is commonly used to mean insects; the article actually discusses only "microbes" and "bacteria." These can be called bugs colloquially, but why not just use the word "microbes" in the title?

This might seem pedantic, but it is not a new result to have find microbes that can digest plastics; AFAIK no "bugs" (insects or other creepy-crawlies) have gained such abilities yet, so the result is a very clickbaity headline.

"I'm not feeling well" "Oh, got a bug from someone?"

So, colloquially?

"Bugs" is more or less only ever used as a colloquial term.

I think I read about some mealworm-y bug that can eat styrofoam (however the microbes in that worm's gut were doing the actual digestion of the styrene)

Edit: found this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uoOUAfY6Cc

and Thoughtemporium: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS9PWzkUG2s

Actually there's a worm/larva that can eat styrofoam, not sure whether this is a great link, but:

https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/beetle-larvae-can...

I thought they determined it was bacteria in the gut?

Well, yes, but still. This is fascinating!

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