It'll be interesting to see what effect it has on the whole food supply chain, as we're pretty dependent on the idea of polymers "keeping out" the things that normally eat our food before we'd get the chance to.
Maybe we'll go back to only eating crazy fermented and spicy things.
It feels to me like the mistake is abusing plastics, which are some of the longest living, most resilient materials, for disposable products. Bacteria that eats polymers might clean up our mess, but it will also destroy one of the key foundations of modern industry, and I don't think the world will just sit back and become pre-industrial again - we'll be back with something worse.
Plus, I guess I'm imagining the polymerphages would probably be more interested in soft plastics – grocery bags, styrofoam. The kind of stuff that already disintegrates pretty easily.
When you go back to books from the 60s, they make bold statements about hard plastics would be everlasting materials, immune to rotting, rusting or shattering - and for the most part, they were right! But for some bizarre reason people chose this 'everlasting' material to make disposable items, and once they realised that it was cheaper than materials that actually do degrade the cat was out of the (polyethylene) bag.
I'm hoping that we can rapidly phase out our use of disposable polymers before these polymerphages start chomping through our indestructible wondermaterials like butter. We can keep the hard plastics for truly long-lived things like car bumpers... and try to stop automotive manufactures from making those disposable, too!
Here's an idea to accelerate this:
"Require by law standard glass bottle designs for all drinks of a certain class, like four or five types of wine bottle and likewise for soft drinks and spirits. Ensure that those designs are public domain. Delegate responsibility of defining the standards to an international organisation like ISO to encourage international adoption. The only losers would be a handful of companies with 'distinctive' or 'iconic' branded bottles (and realistically, people aren't going to stop buying Pepsi because it's in the wrong shape bottle), but the winners would be all manner of industrial bottle-washing and reuse firms, bottle-handling machinery makers and of course consumers getting lower prices. End result: widespread reuse of glass bottles, replacing one-use plastic bottles."
What do you think? I think it's pretty uncontroversial, which is the only thing that seems likely to be passed within a premier's term and thus survive the path to the statute books in liberal democracies!
IMO, we should tax plastics manufacturers in proportion to the product of their biodegradability half-life and known toxicity. Alas, a pipe dream.
Related, great Stanislaw Lem novel about the "Great Decomposition" of paper.