Plastic-Eating Mushrooms (2021)
colorado.edu
colorado.edu
What makes you believe "rot like paper" is more appropriate than "rot like wood"?
Any biological digestion of plastic will be either a very slow process focused on microplastics or have a large mechanical component.
We're again seeing a waste crisis due to a novel material and once again fungi might end up saving us (though we don't have a thousand years to wait this time)
Someone engineering an airborne bacteria that lives off plastics would probably collapse the world economy and kill half the population.
"A plane dissolves in mid-air, its plastic components eaten away. Doomwatch faces its first challenge: to halt the disastrous spread of a man-made virus with the power to melt all plastic."
(Some landfills use geomembranes of other polymers, too.)
It reads like a summer disaster movie, entertaining but mostly forgettable. What was interesting about the book was as a thought experiment about the use of plastics in critical infrastructure and how much of a nightmare plastic-eating anything could be.
Our big concern right now is climate change, and it is in large part driven by CO2 emissions. Plastic is sequestrated carbon, degrading plastic means finding life forms that turn plastic into CO2. Why do that when we are trying so hard to avoid putting more CO2 in the atmosphere. And should we want do destroy that plastic, we can burn it in furnaces and use that energy for ourselves.
As expected, the article mentions unproperly disposed plastic that ends up where it shouldn't be. Plastic-eating mushrooms won't solve that problem unless they work and spread in the wild, which is highly unlikely: these solution usually require very specific conditions. For example PLA is technically biodegradable, but unless you are using an industrial compost plant, it won't. And if these mushrooms work in the wild, we will have a bigger problem...
> Researchers have now found that many species are capable of plastic bioremediation including the common, edible Oyster mushroom. The Oyster mushroom is capable of decomposing plastic while still creating an edible mushroom.
We've heard the same about “clean” nuclear power, about efficient energy storage in massive batteries, electric zero-emissions passenger aircraft, what have you. None of these things are real yet.
Please, can we have news about things that are actually real? Tell me about the plastic-eating mushrooms when there is a landfill (or ocean) in which the mushrooms are actually, actively eating plastic. Until then, this is smoke and mirrors and creates an unhealthy false hope.
The vast majority of the energy humanity uses is actually sunlight hitting crops. Our dependence on fossil fuels is mostly a question of costs and existing infrastructure. We have hundreds of millions of ICE cars and the infrastructure to keep them fueled. Swapping that to EV’s over 40 days is impossible, but doing so in 40 years is relatively easy.
Even EVs are illustrating the problem. Rather than make transit efficient we're going to greenwash individual cars. Remind me where those EV batteries come from? Who cares about the externalities of lithium mining — just put multiple EVs in every home, widen the highways, add some interpasses. For people who don't have cars today (most of the world) will we be providing EVs as well?
At some point it will be too late and people will experience a rapid decline in quality of life (it's already happening if you look at lifespan) with no recourse. Easier to be in denial about that than to, say, not eat meat every single day. Or not have same-day and two-day free delivery in a country where 80% of product transportation is done by truck.
It would be nice to have a silver bullet, but the reality is people will have to make adjustments willingly or have it done for them by the biosphere. The Earth is going to be just fine. Whether or not we will remains TBD.
There is already an excess of carbon to get right there on the atmosphere. Again, the problem is how the plastic is made, not the sheer amount of it.
I don’t want to get into the rest of your post, but I would recommend digging a little deeper before you declare something a problem rather than a tradeoff.
How do we measure the impact of those microplastics? Is it by how expensive a micro-plastic clean-up would cost taxpayers? Is it by the (admittedly marginal, but very widescale) increases in health care costs to people that are impacted by it?
I think if we actually took a full-scale assessment of these sorts of impacts, we'd have a lot of trouble making such a claim
Worrying about cellulose micro plastics is like worrying about the cell walls of lettuce. You can’t digest the stuff but it’s non toxic.
If we all lived like cavemen, we wouldn't need to worry about our carbon emissions.
Let's lift everyone up to the "westerner's" standard of living, instead of the other way around.
I had an app where I could order a car for some occasions and the app is nice. But I do not think it’s superior to a more efficient city: better public transport and bike infrastructure.
I agree with you that having nice things isn’t immediately bad, but especially Americans tend to confuse the things they’re used to for “nice things”, fault of not having tried the better alternative yet.
No offense but this is a really selfish point of view. The point is in one situation only we are uncomfortable, and in the other situation almost every creature on the entire planet is uncomfortable possibly for the rest of human history. The truth is we live unsustainable lives and people have to come to terms with that. If we can't, eventually we'll be forced to. Even if you don't want to.
Also, I honestly think life isn't that much worse without 2 day shipping. People literally lived without it for millennia. We know that we can be happy even with fewer conveniences. Giving those up is another story.
Just look at say China’s electric grid and it’s percentage of Coal vs Wind and Solar or it’s EV adoption. That change is based on cold hard economies.
What happens when a solar panel dies out after ~25 years? We're already in an e-waste crisis. Less than 10% of panels in the US get "recycled" (and by that ofc we mean shipping them to 3rd world countries so we don't have to deal with it). There's only one facility in the whole world currently that has the capability to fully recycle a PV panel (Veolia in France). Every other place just takes the easy parts out and dumps the rest because the economics and risks to health aren't worth it
Not to mention rapidly ramping up production of stuff like EVs is going to have devastating immediate impacts on the climate. EVs are only more carbon-efficient than ICEs after a few years. The reason for that is because of the initial production of EVs produces almost twice as many GHG emissions as the production of an ICE. That's significant since initial production can be as much as half of a vehicle's lifetime GHG emissions
In practice they basically are. Panels are 90-95% silicon which makes up for around 28% of earths crust. That’s largely why they aren’t recycled, they simply aren’t made of partially valuable stuff.
The mounting brackets etc on the other hand are actually recycled.
Climate change isn’t some wall where X is absolutely fine and X + even 1% more is disaster. We are seeing negative effects today and they just get very slightly worse as emissions increase time the CO2 ppm increases by 1.
Exactly, this is not some wall and partly unknown territory, the thing is that this destabilization has inertia and we will suffer the consequences even after we have started actively removing carbon from the atmosphere if that ever happens. Another thing are self sustaining global warming mechanism that have been kicked off and that we don't know the effects of. So it won't get slighly worse, it is getting exponentially worse.
Global numbers aren’t a rosy, but if you look at a developing country like China it produced 17.7% of their electric from renewables in 2008 and that jumped to 27.8% in 2019. While their economic growth more than offset that change, solar and wind adoption is currently much faster than economic growth both in China and around the world.
As to self sustaining global warming that’s not exponential. The current amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will result in a fixed amount of warming that hasn’t happened yet. It’s not an exponential increase just a lag between emissions and increases temperatures.
it's not like "in mice" studies, L5 self-driving, or grid stabilizing battery storage for renewables, which are actually far from realization.
While I'm sure you're not the only one, I'm certainly nothing like you. One of the biggest draws for me to a site like this is the innovative technology. I love it. Sometimes it doesn't pan out -- actually, it's rare for any technology to be broadly useful soon after its invention.
When I was a kid, LEDs were big, clunky, and red. Now they're making meters-long panels of full-color LEDs on a nearly microscopic pitch. The only solar panels were tiny and could only power a desk calculator. Those technologies impressed me back then, and the advancement continues to marvel.
Electric vehicles have been exciting since Henry Ford made one. It took about 100 years for viable commercial EVs, and another 20 for wide adoption. Before Tesla, that would have made the list of "None of these things are real yet."
I'm personally excited by what's on the frontier of technology. Whatever you can buy in the store today... that's the doldroms. Perhaps the risk of failure is what makes for genuine excitement?
Fascinating. Why were they red? Every LED bulb I've looked at has been a headache-inducing blue. I wanna buy LED bulbs for the energy efficiency but it's so hard to find one that doesn't emit so much blue light
I have a similar hatred of cool-blue lighting, at least in the home - but you should know it's very straightforward to find LED bulbs that look good these days. Just pay attention to the "temperature" - it will look like "3000k" or "4000k" on the box. Lower is warmer - 2400k is pretty identical to incandescent, though I go for 3000k. Some makers will label them "soft white" vs "daylight" or "warm white" - as far as I know, there's not much of a standard on those terms, but I can assure you that anything "daylight" or "bright white" will be blueish. Hope this helps!
(In Germany, it goes so far that electric cars have to have blue lights on the outside and everywhere on the dashboard so that everyone can be sure that, yes, this is innovative technology. That there‘s actually a reason to favor red in settings where it‘s important to protect one‘s night vision doesn‘t seem to matter.)
It is telling that the 2014 Nobel Prize in was awarded to the inventors of the blue LED, and not one of another color.
Once you have blue LEDs, using phosphors, you can convert that high energy blue light into a spectrum of lower energy wavelengths, i.e. white light. You can't have white light with red and green LEDs, or at least not that easily.
As for you finding LEDs too blue, that's most likely an issue with the phosphor mix they are using, maybe there are some LEDs that go below the typical 2700K "warm white" standard that will be more to your liking. I don't think lighting with pure red or pure green is a good solution since without a blue component at all, blue objects will appear black, and you will have a result a bit like with these yellowish high-pressure sodium lamps that are common in street lights, which in technical terms is a low CRI. You can try it though: get RGB lights and set them to red, green or yellow.
for example why do we still sell plastic water bottles, in places where the running water is tested and perfectly good?
See:
Howard Sprouse of https://www.theremediators.com/
2005 paper - “fungal diversity and use in decomposition of environmental pollutants” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1040841050030406...
1992 Wariishi - guessing https://www.jbc.org/content/267/33/23688.full.pdf, though ‘Wariishi H’ has a bunch of papers https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C48&q=War...
As for the more inert plastic waste, as the other comments here have mentioned already, the fact that it's inert means it really isn't a problem. It'll just exist naturally and perhaps get mined in the future for recycling.
Polyethylene[1] is not the same thing as Polyurethane[2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyethylene, [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyurethane
Maybe we should think of our buildings the same way and just admit that pipes are gonna break and nothing lasts forever. And plan for it rather than against it.
I think that's where the software industry has naturally evolved with SaaS and where a lot of other industries are slowly evolving towards. Maybe it's time for architecture to do the same
Mushrooms that eat plastic. Plastic that eats mushrooms. 'Eating mushrooms' (ie edible) that are made of plastic.
Any more?
Plastic: Eating Mushrooms (a memoir)
Created by DALL-E using the prompt "Plastic Eating Mushrooms".
While you can eat them after boiling, it's not really a go-to example for an "eating mushroom". Really shows that there's still a lot of context blindness in AI.
Also it seems to have glommed firmly onto the "mushrooms for eating, that are made of plastic" parse.