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Comment by omarhaneef | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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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

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.

What does break down really mean?

> 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?

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