Hacker News Reader

Comment by roughly | Hacker News Reader

I agree that the news is depressing, I go for two things: First, yes, there’s microplastics everywhere, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t stop putting more out there. As the saying goes, the best time to stop polluting the environment was twenty years ago, the second best time is now.

More directly and less, uh, platitudinally - we’ve found microbes capable of digesting and breaking down things we didn’t think were possible and we’re getting better at engineering/encouraging them to do so - I think there’s a legitimate possibility that we can actually solve this problem within our lifetimes.

View on HN

Time for a SF novel: those engineered/encouraged microbes became so efficient over time at adapting to new materials that some mutations began to attack cellulose... Fast forward a few years, and everywhere in the world our forests started turning into stinky and bubbling yellow mud...

Well we already have those sorts of microbes. They're all over. It's why things rot.

It's actually kinda bad enough if they start breaking down plastics. We use plastics in a lot of places specifically because they're resistant to microbial breakdown. This includes electrical insulation, medical equipment, food containers, and so forth. A world where plastics start to rot at the pace of wood is a world in which we have big problems.

Unfortunately, the way we've gone about things it seems like an inevitability that a successful plastic-eating microbe would evolve. Plastics are goddamn everywhere, and they're chock full of yummy hydrocarbons. Any organism that specializes in this food source has very good prospects for thriving.

> Unfortunately, the way we've gone about things it seems like an inevitability that a successful plastic-eating microbe would evolve. Plastics are goddamn everywhere, and they're chock full of yummy hydrocarbons. Any organism that specializes in this food source has very good prospects for thriving.

Plastics are a terrible food source for microbes. The two most common plastics polyethylene and polypropylene are just chains of C2H4 and C3H6 respectively. No nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur, potassium, or any other elements necessary for life.

In a world full of carbon dioxide in the air and photosynthetic life forms, having access to yet another carbon and energy source isn’t much of an advantage except in extreme environments like hydrothermal vents.

There are plenty of nutrients in soil, though. Buried utilities would be most susceptible.

EDIT: Also seawater: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_degradation_by_marine_...

Plastic eating microbes have been identified pretty much everywhere including soil and fresh and salt water. However, most everything has access to the nutrients in those environments and the plastic eating microbes just aren’t competitive with autotrophs and their predators.

There was a Judge Dredd comic about a bacteria that breaks down "plasteel" which they used to build skyscrapers.

not quite that, but Andromeda Strain is a plastic-eating microbe story

Reply on news.ycombinator.com