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Comment by kulahan | Hacker News Reader

The technology of landfills has massively improved over the years. It's not the old pile of garbage covered in birds forever; they turn them into parks and whatnot. It's probably worth looking up, because there's some cool scientific advancements behind it.

I'm pulling this next sentence completely out of my ass, but I also imagine it would be convenient, once we develop bacteria to break this stuff down in an environmentally friendly way, to just pour it over these contained blocks of waste.

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I'm super excited for all the plastic in the world and all the devices that we use everyday to rot because we developed a bacteria that eats it and now your iPhone internals have an infection and your phone just disintegrates and the steering wheel falls off your car

I unironically am. Humans are not responsible enough to control a cheap material that doesn't biodegrade; it's everywhere now, including our own blood stream, because we took a material of near-infinite durability and used it for disposable packaging. Madness. We have lost the right to it.

Lots of organisms eat wood and cotton. How often does your furniture and clothing just randomly disintegrate? You really cannot imagine a middle ground between these products existing for millions of years vs. your steering wheel falling apart while you're driving?

> furniture and clothing just randomly disintegrate?

Quite frequently, if you have moths . Like it used to be a major problem before the insect apocalypse and we used to kill them with poisob

Nature is kinda moving in that direction anyways: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideonella_sakaiensis , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Organisms_breaking_do...

Ringworld. That's the basic idea of the underlying society wide failure in that book.

Except that bacterium was introduced as a weapon specifically to destroy that society. Weren't they trying to take control of the ring once society collapsed?

Not precisely.

https://larryniven.net/puppeteer/puppol.shtml

>The Puppeteers mistook the City Builders to be the Ringworld's engineers and become suddenly afraid to encounter so powerful a species. The Puppeteers examined the Ringworld's superconductor material and created a technophytic bacterium to seed the Ringworld and destroy the superconductor. The strategy was to follow the probes with trading ships and come to the profitable rescue of the City Builders. However, the Puppeteers soon realized that the City Builders could not possibly have created the Ringworld, and discovered several Pak artifacts. The Puppeteers feared the Pak above nearly all other threats.

>The Conservatives took control of the government and the Ringworld project was abandoned.

Puppeteers don't colonize. They trade, and destroy threats, but the Conservative majority doesn't actually want to own or operate the Ringworld. (Remember, they're flying through space on a rosette of five planets... with over a trillion puppeteers crowded onto just one of them, and the other four covered with automated farms. Elbow room isn't something a herd animal values.)

This is now one of my favorite comments.

Would you do me a kindness and let me know later if sarcasm gets through people who can’t care about the environment a bit more than their own consumption? I’ve tried reason but it never works.

Material security is the best predictor of environmentalist political priorities. Nothing else even comes close.

If you think about it, there are strong evolutionary incentives for people to take from someone/something else rather than reduce their own consumption voluntarily. Hell, it’s what all ecosystems are built on!

> once we develop bacteria to break this stuff down in an environmentally friendly way

Sounds as mythical as plastic recycling to me to be honest.

Microorganisms are already evolving to consume plastics.

https://www.wsl.ch/en/news/searching-for-plastic-gobblers-in...

Yeah, people have also gotten mealworms to eat Styrofoam. My concern is more that the plastics industry successfully pushed plastic recycling heavily with marketing so that growth of their products would continue, even as said recycling was just dumping the material in developing countries where it mostly ended up burned or in the ocean. There can be a huge, huge disconnect between technically possible and what happens in the real world.

I was once told by a chemist that bacteria breaking down plastic is not an unthinkable thing. He said it's chemically quite similar to something existing (fat?), so once bacteria stop ignoring plastic due to details in their chemical fingerprint, they can break it down. They would be able to do so already if not for said details.

Hope I remember correctly.

I'm mostly fantasizing about it because I've read about plastic-eating bacteria and radiation-powered bacteria, so it seems possible to do, like, anything. But yeah I fully admit it's probably mythical to some degree.

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