Scientists create artificial protein that can degrade PET plastics in bottles | Hacker News Reader

Scientists create artificial protein that can degrade PET plastics in bottles

phys.org

205 pointsrose_ann_108 comments

As cool as this is, the word “microplastics” is a little misleading. There are dozens of types of plastic in common use, each made from a different monomer with a different chemical linkage, of which PET is only one. The engineered protein in TFA will only work on PET and we’ll need to design new proteins for the other types of plastic. (I can help with that.)

The problem with enzymes eating plastic is that enzymes are small Pacman-shaped protein blobs that are maybe 10 nanometers in diameter, whereas things made of plastic like bottles or even microplastics are huge in comparison. How do you get the little Pacman jaws around the bottle to start breaking it down?

The research paper [1] describes the authors’ effective innovation. They make a protein where one end is a pore-forming shape, and the other end is a PET cutting (called a PETase in the jargon of the field). This way, their protein can access nooks and crannies in the macroplastic shapes, allowing tons of copies of this small enzyme to fully degrade a bottle.

Without this, a great deal of physical agitation is required to break down the plastics into small enough chunks that earlier Pacman enzymes could work on, increasing the time and the cost.

I hope we’ll see the idea of linking the enzymatic “scissors” to a protein pore be used to engineer enzymes to degrade other types of plastics in the future, as the general idea of getting the catalytic machinery into physical contact with every bit of the bottle is broadly applicable to all plastics, not just PET (which is great news)

1. https://phys.org/news/2023-10-scientists-artificial-protein-...

I don't really see why there is a problem with degrading whole bottles. If you have separated from the waste stream, you can incinerate or even landfill them (it's not like you'd be wasting any resources). It's the microplastics that form when the bottles are dumped into the oceans or waterways and broken up by Nature which need a novel solution for removal.

Plastic aren't simply plastics, they have lots of additives to give them different properties. Incinerating is transforming these additives into other chemicals maybe making more toxic molecules escape to the environment in ashes, dust, smoke. And landfilling is storing trash for future generations to solve the problem.

Future generations will never have a reason to dig up landfills.

The most plausible reason they might need to dig them up is to remediate them. Landfills require maintenance in perpetuity, which costs a considerable amount of money. The biggest expense is maintaining the top cap—if it leaks, big problems can result.

After several centuries, it’s hard to imagine that most landfills will still be doing regular maintenance and fighting off entropy maintaining the cap. At some point, with the right technology, it becomes more sensible to reprocess the waste in a more permanent manner.

I think plasma gasification is likely the best idea, but it still needs work.

I would agree. Burying our post-nuclear family waste worldwide for the last 60 years will come back to haunt us. I also agree that we’ll have the tech to address it then into a more sustainable solution and possibly extract energy from it.

This is not how haunting works. We won’t be around anymore. We will haunt whoever is there after us.

Maybe they’ll have better enzymes, though.

it's a figure of speech, not literal. There are no ghosts.

I think what lysozyme said holds even if you do not consider "whole" bottles at all. According to wikipedia the biggest microplastics are 5mm, whereas the enzyme is 10nm, that is 5 orders of magnitude of difference, but just in lenght! To process the entire volume you need to cube the units and you get 15 orders of magnitude in difference (1 mm^3 to 10 nm^3).

To get an idea I asked wolfram alpha what is the volume of the average human, and apparently that is around 66 liters. Then I looked up the estimated water volume of the Baltic sea, and wikipedia says it is 21,700 km^3 of water, soo

    $ units
    586 units, 56 prefixes
    You have: 21.7E3 km3
    You want: 66 liters
        * 3.2878788e+14
        / 3.0414747e-15

if you could somehow fill your entire body with water, then make 30 copies of yourself, and you (30 of you) drink an entire Baltic sea (one for each), that is a very very rough analogy of the task we are giving to that poor enzyme. And this is for a single speck of microplastic! Of course the enzyme is not alone, there are a few other billions (trillions?) others with it, but there are also a few million specks of microplastic at any point in the sea. This is a very difficult task.

Looks like the title was edited to accommodate your clarification.

Unfortunately, that makes your comment a bit confusing, since the context of the title change is not present. I think the best solution would have been the title, "Scientists create artificial protein capable of degrading [PET] microplastics in bottles".

the word “microplastics” is a little misleading

It was never about precision, truth, nor actual science. It was always about "plastics=bad" ideological virtue signaling, just like "chemicals=bad" and "(non-ionising) radiation=bad" before it.

> It was never about precision, truth, nor actual science. It was always about "plastics=bad" ideological virtue signaling

Microplastics were not a concept created for ideological virtue signaling. I don't know who manipulated you into thinking that was true, but you may wish to re-evaluate where you've been getting your information. The good news is that you don't have to depend on some invented sinister backstory for microplastics, you can instead read the paper where the phrase was coined for yourself (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/8575062_Lost_at_Sea...) and see that it was just a lot of typical boring science like searching through sediment and plankton samples, and keeping track of what lugworms eat. A paper that concludes with "we'd need more research to determine if there are any environmental consequences" is about as far from ideological virtue signaling as it gets. Take your own advice and "Beware those who distort the truth and exploit fear for their own gains."

As far as precision goes, currently microplastics are for plastic bits smaller than 5mm. We even have primary and secondary categories for them. Nanoplastics are for bits smaller than 100 nm. Do we really need a better classification system at this stage? I imagine that shortly after we do, we'll get one. Science loves to come up with boxes to put things in.

There's always going to be that guy...

Regardless what the origin was, it should be clear to see that the term has become associated with ideological virtue signaling and used to promote all manner of junk science and taken up by the engagement-chasing paranoia-spreading media.

You said:

> It was never about precision, truth, nor actual science

Now you know that is false. You choose to believe it anyway. Contemplate that for a moment.

Another story about waste "solutions," another opportunity to remind the gentle readers about plasma gasification. A re-post of an earlier comment of mine on the topic follows:

---

Why are we still not talking about plasma gasification? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification

As far as I can tell, the only real "disadvantages" if you can call them that, are:

1. more expensive than throwing the garbage in a big pile somewhere

2. need to clean it from time to time

3. not necessarily a profitable business

Other than that, it can handle just about anything that's not radioactive, can be designed to produce 0 toxic byproducts, and can run at or at least only slightly below energy neutral. Plasma gasifiers can also consume a huge amount of garbage for their size, so much so that the US Navy is starting to put them on the latest generation of aircraft carriers.

Not building out more gasifiers seems to me a failure of the free market. Because it's hard to make it profitable, no one is doing it - when really we should just be building one or two near every major city and funneling all our garbage there.

In theory, we could build out enough to start working through all the landfills too.

Does plasma gasification result in plastic monomers that can be used as building blocks for new polymers? If not, it seems like it is addressing a different need.

this novel process seems to produce carbon dioxide and water, not terephthalic acid

ah, CO2 ... we've been looking for a new source of this extremely rare material for some time now, I hear.

I'm thinking in the same way, just would love a slimmed down domestic version. The inefficiency of garbage trucks hauling waste around should easily cover the cost of energy for both gasification and the reduction of pollution to acceptable levels.

This would also bring you the added benefit of actually knowing that your waste does not contribute to introducing harmful toxins to groundwater supply or even the sea.

probably because landfills work fine if you aren't on an aircraft carrier. and they're cheaper. they're also rich veins of valuable minerals for the future, but that unfortunately doesn't figure into their present profitability

It's also mentioned that it's more expensive than normal incineration, and waste-to-energy gets you most of the way towards eliminating the worst parts of plastic waste if done right. It's very widespread in Japan and parts of Europe already.

Usually the issue with waste-to-energy is locating a facility, and I would imagine plasma gasification would run into similar NIMBY issues just because people don't like the idea of being next to a large intake facility of garbage, regardless of how bad it is in practice.

You missed many countries aren't huge unlike the US

do the math instead of posting random bullshit

i did

https://dercuano.github.io/topics/garbage.html

in particular

https://dercuano.github.io/notes/underground-arcology.html#a...

I was always thinking, could we combine incineration + plasma gasification? What if we burn the garbage, which results in a lot of heat + clean + noxious gases, and then we just pass the gases through plasma? That should take care of anything that is dangerous in the emissions, but also make it more efficient, because a lot of the mass has already burned, plasma doesn't have to go through that much material anymore

Isn't there more mass after burning, from the added oxygen?

Recent article suggests it can be "free" when selling the graphene, hydrogen: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.202306763

The most frustrating problem with plasma gasification from my perspective is that it essentially down cycles metals. That is, the metals either end up in slag or as a difficult-to-refine mixture.

That was my understanding the last time I worked on this. I would love to hear about any progress on this.

For what it’s worth, I think the companies that have tried this have not pursued the correct business model. They all either want to sell their system (bad idea) or sell syngas (ok, but not enough). What they need to do is charge tipping fees like a landfill to simply dispose of the trash.

With these articles I always wonder what they're turned into, since headlines and introductory paragraphs always conveniently omit that. These seem to be the relevant parts of the article:

> degrading PET [particles] and reducing them to their essential components, which would allow them to be broken down or recycled

> "One variant breaks down the PET particles more thoroughly, so it could be used for degradation in sewage treatment plants. The other gives rise to the initial components needed for recycling. In this way we can purify or recycle, depending on the needs," explains Laura Fernández López

Hmm, so that sounds like it's a step forwards (working the problem), but not yet a solution that can recycle PET into something anyone can use

Edit: this is why I'm asking...

Article: "... the bacterium Idionella sakaiensis, which is capable of degrading this type of plastic and was discovered in 2016 in a packaging recycling plant in Japan."

Wikipedia on Ideonella sakaiensis: "[they] mineralize 75% of the degraded PET into carbon dioxide" (to be fair, it also produces a "MHETase enzyme" which "could also be optimized and used in recycling or bioremediation applications") https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideonella_sakaiensis

Nice. A few points:

* This protein acts as a PETase - see also <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37659327> - but may work at room temperature, and more efficiently

* The term 'artificial protein' is a bit awkward - it's a modified version of an existing protein from an anemone (see : <https://www.rcsb.org/structure/4tsy>)

* The scaffold protein is a pore-forming structure - where multiple trans-membrane helices come together, like melittin in bee venom - so they claim it could work as part of a membrane-bound complex

> The term 'artificial protein' is a bit awkward

I agree. The proper term would be engineered protein, since it is a fusion of two existing protein domains: an already engineered cutinase (a PETase ancestor) with a pore-forming protein (FraC).

What happens if eventually we find this protein in the wild? :)

The entire plastics industry is screwed.

It is only a matter of time before bacteria evolve some way of getting at the energy stored in plastics. Once that happens, once plastics start to "rot" as they are eaten by bacteria, the impacts on our technology could be catastrophic. The world might looks very steampunk as metal and ceramics replace plastics.

Wood-eating bacteria already exist and we use wood as a material for many things. It's not like such bacteria just spread from breath, like covid-viruses...

Look up shipworm, which historically took out many ships. Plenty of stuff eats wood quickly enough to cause issues. We have just evolved countermeasures. And trees are the product of a billion years of anti-predator evolution. Plastic is different than wood. It is homogenous and dead. Something like a plastic-eating bacteria might move through it exponentially.

There are plenty of old wooden houses still standing (even ones which predate modern plastic based paints), people still make boats out of wood too. I suspect similar things will happen with plastic, we'll learn to build and protect plastic in the way that we used to do with wood, and probably more stuff will be built out of stone.

That variant would be a natural/wild-type one.

We already make many things from materials that can be degraded by microbes (wood, cotton, leather, etc.). They can be preserved by keeping them dry, or with paint or other surface treatments. For the rare circumstances where this is impossible (e.g. medical devices) we have fluoropolymers, which I'm confident aren't going to get degraded by microbes any time soon.

A long time ago, wood (Lignin) wasn’t biodegradable. Trees just piled up instead of rotting. That resulted in oil deposits. These we turn into plastics.

Bacteria acquiring genes to feed on plastics would lead to closing the circle again. Although supply will be cut short when humanity gives up producing plastics.

> Trees just piled up instead of rotting. That resulted in oil deposits.

That resulted in coal deposits of the Carboniferous. Not oil.

"microplastics in bottles" is even more awkward - I mean, as long as they're part of a bottle, they're by definition not microplastics?

Maybe they're very very small bottles.

Is there any benefits to degrading plastic (using proteins or bacteria) if BPA/BPS will stay not degraded? From what I recon health harm comes not from plastic itself but from additives like BPA, BPS e. t. c.

Perfect is the enemy of good.

Plastic and Microplastics are an environmental hazard to animal life, with a specific threat to aquatic life. The plastic itself is a significant physical hazard for the life. The attached link has an incredible photo of a the scale of a small fish and various microplastics. It's important to note that currently there is no cost effective way for water treatment plants to filter for these.

https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/microplast...

From your own link:

Scientists are still unsure whether consumed microplastics are harmful to human or animal health

Because plastics are inert. Beware those who distort the truth and exploit fear for their own gains.

"The number of published studies considering the effects of microplastic particles on aquatic organisms is considerable. In aquatic invertebrates, microplastics cause a decline in feeding behavior and fertility, slow down larval growth and development, increase oxygen consumption, and stimulate the production of reactive oxygen species. In fish, the microplastics may cause structural damage to the intestine, liver, gills, and brain, while affecting metabolic balance, behavior, and fertility; the degree of these harmful effects depends on the particle sizes and doses, as well as the exposure parameters."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9205308/

The additives include inert or reinforcing fillers which endow the plastic with specific properties: plasticizers, antioxidants, UV stabilizers, lubricants, dyes, and flame retardants

Do they really think plasticizers are inert, or more so than the plastics themselves?

I'm sure you can find plenty of studies that say cellphone radiation is harmful too.

The LK-99 debacle is still recent; and it showed just how much the bulk of published "science" can't be farther from the truth when there are other motivations.

I see similar articles or research like twice a year. And nothing ever comes of it.

seriously. I'd say more often than that even. is it that they are being used and we're just not hearing it, or is there something holding them back?

A very important sentiment comes of it: don’t worry, politicians, The solution to this polluting agent is near. The more plastic we generate today, the sooner we are to finding a final solution which does not involve damaging our sacred revenue rate.

There’s no need to destroy our perfect status quo

While that nice the goal is to significantly reduce the use of plastics and petrochemical in general. What we are talking about is a reengining of modern tools and products. These efforts will be aggressive.

Plastic eating enzymes have been a thing since the 90s. There's a breathless headline every 3-6 months. None get out of the lab

Less frequently we get articles about mealworms evolving the ability to eat plastics.

It's good news, but reminded me at once Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters (1971) by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis, where a bacteria made to utilize plastic went wild and started destroying wire isolation everywhere, causing multiple crashes etc.

I'd like to know who originally put incompatible types of plastic under the same number, which contaminates recycling runs. Like PET/PETE under "1" and injection-molded/blow-molded HDPE under "2":

https://www.warwickri.gov/sanitation-recycling/faq/why-cant-...

Many cities have banned recycling the most commonly used plastics, like plastic water bottles made of 1 (PET). Where I live, 1 and 2 get recycled, 3 (PVC) gets thrown in a landfill and 4-7 get sent to a separate refinery which converts them to diesel fuel.

Not to mention that there seems to be no standard on the legibility of the number.

How many people reading this have thought about automating recycling by having machine learning sort the types? Yet I've never seen "recycling engineer" as a job title. Nor have I seen any grants for improving recycling. Nor any corporations/billionaires making recycling a priority. There have even been TV shows by prominent celebrities pushing propaganda against recycling, like the Penn & Teller: Bullsh*t! episode from the post Dot Bomb luddite era of 2004:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0771119/

We're willing to drink a protein that can degrade plastic before we're willing to hold industry accountable for the waste it produces?

pete isn't a different kind of plastic from pet, it's just a usa-only abbreviation to avoid the non-plastic-related pet trademark the pet company uses on their disposable drinking vessels made from whatever material

the broader point is valid that recycling even hdpe is difficult because of the diversity of fillers and other additives, not to mention variation in molecular weight even before scission by ultraviolet, hydrolysis, or the heat of the molding process

there are in fact people who make a living by recycling. until recently around here they even bought pet, offering lower prices for the colored pet (because with pet you really can economically separate out the fillers and additives and repolymerize it to a known molecular weight)

mostly they recycle paper (mostly cardboard), copper, bronze, brass, lead, and aluminum. glass, steel, concrete, and plastics can be recycled but it's hard to make it profitable

if you hold industry liable for damage done by people improperly discarding its products, soon you will have no industry

>if you hold industry liable for damage done by people improperly discarding its products, soon you will have no industry

I don't see how this follows. It might make plastics more expensive... but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

liability for people improperly discarding your products is unlimited; there is no limit to how much damage they can do, and there's nothing you can do to stop them except screen your clients very carefully

and that's why, for example, armadillo aerospace went under; vendors of rocket-grade peroxide do screen their clients very carefully, for precisely that reason, and they had to scrap their peroxide engine design and go back to the drawing board

industry is going to happen instead in places like china where it's allowed (at least for chinese people)

> if you hold industry liable for damage done by people improperly discarding its products, soon you will have no industry

If it's predominantly being misused, then they do have a moral obligation. They control the packaging, and they know how much of it will end up improperly discarded. And by moral obligation, I really mean it should be a regulation to capture the damage done. Perhaps the recycling deposit from aluminum cans should be expanded.

Plastic recycling was a sham, and still is; it's never been economically viable and never will be, because the polymer degrades, permanently, as part of production, use, and aging.

It's window-dressing so the industry can shift attention away from limiting production of something that shouldn't see anywhere near the widespread use it does.

The same is true of the stories you see all the time about some group or person doing a beach cleanup. It casts the problem as the fault of people dumping the stuff, while pretending like it's a solvable problem, if only we had enough people rummaging around cleaning up beaches, parks, ocean bays, fields, hiking trails, abandoned properties, etc.

Nature created mycelium which eats microplastics (and all kinds of carbohydrates) for lunch and grows shrooms on top of it. Not sure why we need artificial proteins for that.

The whole "microplastics" thing is terrifyging

How about microplastics in the body? :^]

  Reminded me of Ice-9

Major omitted-from-headline limitation: It only works on PET plastic. (AKA "PETE", or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyethylene_terephthalate - recycling number "1" or "01")

Quibble: "microplastics in bottles" looks far more like keyword stuffing then a sensible description.

I find the current title much more clear than requiring that people know what PET is.

And if you're familiar enough to know what plastic types exist, you probably also realize that this won't be a miracle protein that can tackle a ton of different chemicals with this one innovation/advancement.

Unless you're a chemical engineer, I can't think of a place where anyone would need to know what PET is. Bottle returns don't have different holes based on the recycling type, I can even throw glass and cans in with plastic bottles and it'll scan the label and sort it out. For me, I might have made a tentative guess that PET is used in bottles, and my dad inspects factories that produce that stuff and so it's not like I had no exposure to it (just no interest in the myriad of plastics we're trying to avoid)

Anyone who uses 3D printers would need to know what PET is, not to mention half a dozen other plastics. ;-)

PLA is usually the go-to; it's ideal in nearly every respect except cost, especially its modern formulations. But PETG is still often used for its heat resistance, Polycarbonate is great for physical strength, ASA is lovely for outdoors work, ABS is still the cheapest option... and some people are crazy enough to print Nylon.

Okay - "Scientists create artificial protein that can degrade a very common type of plastic".

I tried "Scientists create protein that can degrade a common plastic in bottles" as well but I think it's ok to say "PET" even if few people know what it is. It's implicit that it's (a) not all plastics and (b) the article will say what it is.

Ok, we've s/micro/PET /'d the title above. Thanks!

Microplastics are the "lead/asbestos poisoning" of our generation, and the problem is actually far more dire than either of the former. Someday, we will look back on how we could have ever allowed microplastics into our lives with shock and awe.

Why do we allow burning gigantic storages of carbohydrate fuels while we know full well that the planet's livability suffers from climate change?

Why do we allow fueling our energy plants and automobiles with fossil fuels that causes air pollution responsible for 1/5 deaths world wide? [0]

Why do we allow one-time use plastics and synthetic tire rubbers while knowing it causes irreversible microplastics pollution of land and sea?

... looking at you, fossil fuel lobbyists.

[0]: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/c-change/news/fossil-fuel-air-p...

The underlying cause of climate change, air pollution and waterways full of plastic waste is the Tragedy of the Commons.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/climate-ch...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

Yep. We should have forced mining and oil companies to pay opportunity costs to our future self whenever they extract finite resources from the planet.

The challenge is that those costs were not understood when these extractive heavy industries were stood up, and large parts of our legal and governance systems were set up to ensure that those industries could exist, presumably to enrich all of us (e.g., the mineral rights system). By the time the costs were understood, the owners of those industries had accrued enough capital from their operation to actively fight off challenges to them for decades.

The tragedy is obvious, but I think it's an important example as we move forward with other dramatic and potentially disastrous technological changes. What happens if we discover conclusively in 15 years that observing recommendation-algorithm driven social media for more than an hour a day causes dementia? Would we move quickly to ban it, or would we endure a protracted fight with Meta, TikTok et. al. about our "right to scroll" while the damages accrue?

Are you not guilty for all the times you filled up your petrol powered car spewed all that carbon and air pollution into the air?

Embedded in the tragedy of the commons is a Nash equilibrium where it is in the interest of individual parties to not cooperate - where cooperation would be mutually beneficial.

So, at country scale, implementing a carbon tax on any set of countries immediately reduces their competitiveness against tax-free countries. Over time, this difference will lead to wide divergences in outcomes.

It's kind of interesting how we, as carbon based lifeforms, have been spewing carbon products into every part of our environment en-mass and they all seem to have negative influences on our well being.

> burning gigantic storages of carbohydrate fuels

Fossil fuels are hydrocarbons - they're made up of carbon and hydrogen (and very little oxygen). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrocarbon

Carbohydrate is C + H + oxygen, and generally refers to biological molecules derived from glucose. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbohydrate

it's fascinating to see in real time. you would think it would be Semmelweiss-esque - a lone discredited voice - but it's not. everyone seems to be fully aware of the problem and its likely dangers ... and yet the problem is as bad as ever

The reason is simple: despite their many problems, plastics are a modern day miracle material. The alternatives I see proposed may match or beat it on one or two factors, but not everything.

A viable general replacement for plastic needs to beat plastic on price, weight, durability, sanitation, strength, and so much more.

or we could be willing to trade off some of these factors in order not to befoul our home

^^^ So very much this! ^^^ It's a shame I cannot upvote this more than once.

It is sort of weird because people around the world are staving, while we have tons of food waste in the west. So there is in some sense a crisis and plastics are a tool that could be used to help solve it.

But we don’t, instead we peel oranges and then sell them in plastic containers at the grocery store.

If we were talking about making hard trade-offs between preservation required to save lives and reducing pollution that would be one thing. Instead we use it to enable greater waste.

> But we don’t, instead we peel oranges and then sell them in plastic containers at the grocery store.

Someone is selling peeled oranges? O.o

How long until they sell peeled apples?

Maybe not anymore, but Wholefoods gave it a try, there was a bit of mockery. In general I think the idea that our food is over-processed and over-packaged is not a new complaint, haha.

in the UK in the "meal deal" section of supermarkets, you can find peeled anything in a little plastic box

Ok, you first. And don't be shocked when people (especially the lower classes) get upset when your efforts to ban plastics lead to meat and produce spoiling much faster and/or costing much more, or lead to shipping costs on common goods increasing significantly, etc.

the issue here isn't the wrapping on vital foods. no one is asking for that to be banned. or no one should be anyway. the issue is the wrapping on literally everything else

Have you seen that there is an allowed amount of plastic mixed into animal feed? https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/dec/15/legal-pl...

This is about more than sanitary wrapping.

who is going to pay for that?

I think this is really underselling the danger of lead and asbestos. They were known to be dangerous basically since their commercial introduction and there are undeniable large scale negative health trends which are clearly attributable to both, unlike with microplastics

The negative effects of lead and asbestos are known and abatement is ongoing. There are grants being administered today to aid in their continued abatement.

The negative known effects of microplastics are emerging. The public are not as aware of the extent to which they are exposed to microplastics daily. We don't actually know the full extent of the damage being done yet, but what we do know so far is that microplastics affect neurological development, fertility, and are known endocrine-disrupters. It will take time to see the full effects of microplastics in our environment, and it's going to get worse before it gets better.

I've yet to see any evidence that microplastics are toxic. Plastics are generally inert, and by the time they have broken down into microscopic pieces, most plasticizers have already been leached from the particles.

Microplastics are an ugly witness to pollution, but are likely not themselves very harmful.

The base monomers and polymers of PET may not themselves be toxic, but there are plasticizer chemicals added to them to adjust the characteristics that can have biological impacts. Additionally, once the PET starts to break into microplastics, it can attract and accumulate other chemicals that are actually toxic.

Other plastics can be directly toxic, such as styrenes.

This announcement sounds like something mentioned in the background on TV while the soon to be hero eats breakfast before heading to work in an underpaid thankless position. 15 minutes later the audience learns that the protein has escaped the lab, become sentient, and is assembling plastic into Godzilla.

It would be an interesting world if all our plastics started to rot. Water and sewerage piping is mostly plastic, there's heavy uses of plastics in electrical infrastructure, the majority of our containers, many car parts, the bulk of the housings of our electronics, building weatherproofing, most of our clothing... It would be nice to use other materials, but plastics are used because they're cheap, easy to work with, and they work well.

Also, how much plastic has been produced over the last 100 years? It also would have been nice not to have just thrown it all into a landfill, but now that it's there do we really want to release all the CO2 that's been safely locked away underground in solid plastic?

Plastics are largely cheap because they're bi-products of natural gas, gasoline and diesel fuel manufacturing. As demand for those fuels declines, plastics will necessarily become more expensive.

They certainly have a lot of inherent utility, but given the emerging risks to the planet's ecology and our own health, I think it's hard to see a future where we extensively use plastics to the same extent we do now.

I’d love to get a sense of how much less plastic will be made - or how much more it will cost - as renewable energy and electric vehicles replace fossil fuels. Has someone modeled this?

How do you keep something like this from spreading and deteriorating plastics in things you don't want it to?

GOP: "Oh shit, Hunter's laptop is now a pile of goo! What are we going to rant about all day now?"

We should stop focusing on recycling plastics and invest in garbage incinerators/power plants.

More CO2 and a lovely cocktail of toxic gases, this doesn't sound like the elegant solution you're phrasing it as.

A proper incinerator doesn't release toxic gases and generates electricity so perhaps fewer fossil fuels can be burnt while it's running so it's not quite as bad as how you're phrasing it either.

I don't claim to know what's best out of recycle, incinerate, landfill and biodegrade. To me none of them seems obviously bad. Various calculations would need to be done.

I just read the wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste-to-energy_plant Some interesting points:

"Waste-to-energy plants cause less air pollution than coal plants, but more than natural gas plants.[2] At the same time, it is carbon-negative: processing waste into fuel releases considerably less carbon and methane into the air than having waste decay away in landfills or bodies of water."

"Burning municipal waste does produce significant amounts of dioxin and furan emissions[4] to the atmosphere as compared to the smaller amounts produced by burning coal or natural gas. Dioxins and furans are considered by many to be serious health hazards. However, advances in emission control designs and very stringent new governmental regulations, as well as public opposition to municipal waste incinerators, have caused large reductions in the amount of dioxins and furans produced by waste-to-energy plants."

Search "waste to energy Sweden". It's not perfect, but they have emissions standards and they do filtration.

It's probably significantly better than pretending to recycle the stuff and then burning fuel to ship it somewhere else.

I wish hacker news was only about computing and not fringe science news, because unless it's an innovative product and it shows it's a breakthrough, it's probably techno-optimism or it's click-baity.

This applies for everything about batteries, and environmental techs.

The supraconductor crystal news was also quite a revealing event of the problem.

You need a filter. Maybe an AI filter?

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