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Comment by betwixthewires | Hacker News Reader

Plastic's main selling point is it's durability, it's resistance to decay. But it's basically made of organic compounds, the thing that makes it durable is it's novelty in the environment and this resistance to decay will not last long. The day will come when it rots like paper, and it's much closer than we think.

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I think plastics main selling point is not its longevity, but the possibility to easily form objects of many shapes.

What makes you believe "rot like paper" is more appropriate than "rot like wood"?

Wood is thicker, denser, and has more structure than paper. My guess is that paper is a closer analogy in this case.

This is probably accurate for films and fabrics, but I wouldn't be surprised if thick solids would be at least as slow to rot as wood. I don't know what proportion of plastic mass is in each form though.

Wood is a nice analogy because when it was first evolved there was nothing on earth that could break down the lignin. As a result, we had a couple thousand years where wood just piled up like a global waste crisis. Eventually fungi got really good at dealing with it

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)

It was several million years

Paper is porous. Metal sheets are closer to it.

Any biological digestion of plastic will be either a very slow process focused on microplastics or have a large mechanical component.

Putting my sci-fi/apocalypse tin foil hat on:

Someone engineering an airborne bacteria that lives off plastics would probably collapse the world economy and kill half the population.

You're fifty years late. Doomwatch did an episode called The Plastic Eaters in 1970.

"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."

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0564476/

I’m relieved I’m not the only one who immediately thought of what could go wrong. I’ll admit I didn’t think of the airborne part but I did immediately think of it escaping the landfills.

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