George Carlin was right: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBRquiS1pis
"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
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.
It's funny to me that we need to destroy more trees for a manufactured moral panic
It's funny to me that we need to destroy more trees for a manufactured moral panic
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 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.
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.
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"