Fungus breaks down ocean plastic
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But a large part of microplastics found in aquatic environments is abraison from car tires. So we need more and different fungi ...
[sciencenews](https://www.sciencenews.org/article/car-tires-and-brake-pads...)
[theconversation](https://theconversation.com/how-your-car-sheds-microplastics...)
[springeropen](https://microplastics.springeropen.com/track/pdf/10.1186/s43...)
I don’t know what the fuck Patagonia thinks they’re doing switching to recycled polyester to make their clothing more environmental.
We need a few more decades of inflation before anyone can rightly claim to become a billionaire without fucking people over.
> Virtue: Positive trait or quality deemed to be morally good
Saints were certainly concerned with virtues.
I stated at the outset that this is not a popular opinion.
Using recycled materials of any sort reduces the consumption of new materials. This is a net positive for the environment, absent any extremes in the use of recycled materials. (i.e. extreme energy consumption or harmful chemicals used in the recycling process)
Cotton is what most people think of as a natural fiber, and even its use can entail a high environmental cost.
Or it can be recycled, in which case most of the plastic in the net is fixed into a new physical object.
The second one seems better to me than the first one. Do you disagree? Or is your objection to the continued use of plastics in clothing at all?
If every mile human beings moved in cars was replaced with two miles taken by train, the world would be a less polluted place.
Anyway, the napkin math is 20 million tons of tires manufactured per year. If 1% of that is lost as worn down tread (or sidewalls depending on the driver), then that is 200,000 tons of tire compound particles dispersed into the environment per year.
I always assumed it was orders of magnitude more than that. But that seems like an amount that, if it were to exist, some sort of bacteria/fungus/algae could actually probably handle.
> In Switzerland, tire wear accounts for an estimated 90 percent of the microplastics released into the environment.
https://www.admin.ch/gov/en/start/documentation/media-releas...
90% (!) of microplastics in Switzerland’s environment are from tire abrasion.
If we hypothetically radically banned cars, we would not only reduce landscape fragmentation, space requirements in public spaces, accidents and risks, damages to humans and animals, costs that are borne by the public, noise pollution and particulate matter air pollution, but also we would cut down microplastic emissions by 10:1!
Do plant microfibers accumulate in the body over time, like plastic or asbestos fibers? Do we end up loaded with this stuff in old age?
One of the most lethal professions of old was baker, because of all the flour dust inhaled.
The breakdown of lignin by fungi shows the lengths organisms have to go to decompose refractory organic materials. A whole suite of enzymes and associated compounds are released into the extracellular environment by these fungi, including hydrogen peroxide, some of which is decomposed to highly oxidizing hydroxyl radicals. This also shows why it should not be surprising fungi are capable of attacking plastics, at least to some extent: they are already blasting biopolymers with a barrage of non-specific highly reactive oxidants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenton%27s_reagent
Review article on fungal degradation of lignin:
There's no reason to expect this to be the analogy to hold for reactive chemicals capable of decomposing organic polymers, which are generally tougher to decompose than our also-organic cells.
- "Cyclodextrin promotes atherosclerosis regression via macrophage reprogramming" https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scitranslmed.aad6100 https://www.popsci.com/compound-in-powdered-alcohol-can-also...
Cellulose and Lignin are dietary fiber:
- "Dietary cellulose induces anti-inflammatory immunity and transcriptional programs via maturation of the intestinal microbiota" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7583510/ :
> Dietary cellulose is an insoluble fiber and consists exclusively of unbranched β-1,4-linked glucose monomers. It is the major component of plant cell walls and thus a prominent fiber in grains, vegetables and fruits. Whereas the importance of cellulolytic bacteria for ruminants was described already in the 1960s, it still remains enigmatic whether the fermentation of cellulose has physiological effects in monogastric mammals. [6–11] Under experimental conditions, it has been shown that the amount of dietary cellulose influences the richness of the colonic microbiota, the intestinal architecture, metabolic functions and susceptibility to colitis. [12,13] Moreover, mice fed a cellulose-enriched diet were protected from experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE) through changes in their microbial and metabolic profiles and reduced numbers of pro-inflammatory T cells.
But what about fungi in the body and diet?
What about lignin; Is lignin dietary fiber?
From "Dietary fibre in foods: a review" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7583510/ :
> Dietary fibre includes polysaccharides, oligosaccharides, lignin and associated plant substances.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40649844 re: sustainable food packaging solutions :
> Cellulose and algae are considered safe for human consumption and are also biodegradable; but is that an RCT study?
> CO2 + Lignin is not edible but is biodegradable and could replace plastics.
>> "CO2 and Lignin-Based Sustainable Polymers with Closed-Loop Chemical Recycling" (2024) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adfm.202403035
> What incentives would incentivize the market to change over to sustainable biodegradable food-safe packaging?
What if there was something we could eat that basically super-powered our macrophages to to it for us? They already eat the microplastics but they just sit inside them.[1] Digesting them might be poisonous I guess ...
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03043...
We have a lot of defenses to make sure large molecules don't make it into the bloodstream so if those polymers start making it through, we'd have much bigger problems. Microplastics are a special case because they're very chemically inert, but they're still filtered out by the kidneys. Any cellulose or lignin would be too.
To be honest, after reading some of these microplastics papers I'm starting to suspect most of them are bullshit. Plastics are everywhere in a modern lab and rarely do these papers have proper controls, which I suspect would show that there is a baseline level of microplastic contamination in labs that is unavoidable. Petri dishes, pipettes, microplates, EVERYTHING is plastic, packaged in plastic, and cleaned using plastic tools, all by people wearing tons of synthetic fibers.
We went through this same nonsense when genetic sequencers first became available until people got it into their heads that DNA contamination was everywhere and that we had to be really careful with sample collection and statistical methods.
> One of the most lethal professions of old was baker, because of all the flour dust inhaled.
Pretty much anything that is small enough to irritate the lungs will cause the same effect, especially at professional exposure levels (or worse, like silicosis). Pre-industrial agricultural workers and miners frequently suffered from pneumoconiosis from dust inhalation too, for example.
I’d like to see some reproduction research on the more wild microplastics results akin to the level of diligence put in when Clair Cameron Patterson was developing Uranium Lead dating and discovered that due to lead added to petroleum based fuels the whole fucking planet was tainted with a level of background lead … he had to go a long way, basically building a clean room before such rooms were considered a normal part of precision research… to get a clean environment with no contamination and get accurate results.
It doesn’t have to be quite that bad for a modern researcher, but I’d like to see a lot more of these microplastics papers where they document that they used no or as close to no plastic at any point in sample handling… if a liquid sample has gone from a plastic sample jar and a plastic lid to a plastic pippet to a plastic ampoule with a plastic lid into a machine that agitated it and so on… well of course there’s a damn chance the sample has more plastic in it! I’m not even going to suggest that all the plastic came from the containers that would be stupid… but when I start seeing results like microplastic found in human testicular tissue… I want to know how careful they were with sample contamination because it’s important that we know how bad the problem is getting, is it “1000” or “1002” on whatever scale is being used may not seem like much when the error bars might be +/- 10… but it does matter when this result gets aggregated into meta analysis and other modern “re-processing” that helps us understand the world at the larger scale where studies of aggregate data are the only practical way to approach the problems.
Breathing is clearly on the table for discussion
Given their ubiquity, and their endocrine disrupting properties, I highly suspect that the rise in autism prevalence may in part be attributed to the prenatal exposures to microplastics, during which timing and dose effects of androgens exposures have set-up long lasting programs of development.
Re bakers, I did not know about that. Very interesting.
Edit:
This question is serious. If this fungus would eat all that plastic, this would introduce a huge amount of new life in the ocean with unknown effects to the ecosystem. We would replace one problem with another.
I assume/hope that it doesn't turn/get converted to a plasticofungi that cannot be eaten by fish/etc. This would only reshape the pollution, not eliminate it.
I didn't find an answer to this in this specific article; I hope it will be covered somewhere else.
If we could break down the molecules ourselves we would have done it already, but it's not easy to do that. That is why we benefit from these natural occurring organisms that break them down and leave a more useful byproduct (to us). Although nano technology can eventually give us the ability to do this in a controlled way.
If you had nothing to eat you'd also give plastic a try, and you could miraculously be the chosen one who can break down plastic, but you'd switch back to normal food as soon as possible.
If it's bacteria, then soon the entire world will be full of plastic-digesting bacteria. If it's fungus, it will start to appear here and there at random.
These generally won’t occur outside of a bioreactor, so you’re not going to see them attacking random plastics in your house.
The golden age of plastic that we live in allows for food packaging that cannot be penetrated by microorganisms, which in turn increases shelf life of some produce from like half a week to multiple weeks.
Once there are more such microorganisms in the next one hundred years we might have problems packaging our food.
And plastic is in essence a multi-step “life process” of crude oil: Instead of incinerating heating oil for our houses, plastic lives a first life as packaging, and then gets incinerated and provides heat over communal heating – ideally.
Of course, the problem is when it ends up in the water instead of being burned.
There are a lot of different types of plastics the common ones use in packaging are LE-PE (light density polyethylene) and PP (polypropylene). They are both thermoplastic, they melt then heated. Silicone is also a form of plastic, it's thermoset (it chars effectively and it doesn't melt) - and it's awfully expensive. There are other plastic, e.g. nylon (PA6) that are still expensive but much cheaper than silicone.
And that is entirely a question of waste management.
The plastic straw that the EU just outlawed would never have ended up in the ocean. Meanwhile, plastic gets dumped into rivers by the truckloads - outside the EU.
The EU didn’t outlaw “plastic straws”, it outlawed a range of things, one of which is the plastic straw. But then why do plastic straws always come up? Because this is also in response to a video of a turtle in pain with a plastic straw up its nose (so yes it did end up in the ocean).
And creating less single use products is a step of waste management by the way. Now I’m not particularly in favour of paper straws, but bamboo straws have taken off as a replacement and that’s a rather good thing I would say.
But again this is only about straws because you made it about straws. The same applies to many other single use plastics.
It was a European plastic straw? Was there an address on it, or how can you tell?
The point the person you responded to was making wasn't about plastic straws, but rather about the fact that European trash almost never lands in the ocean: https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics
And as a parent, I can assure you that I get reminded of this on a weekly basis.
We should ban more single-use non biodegradable plastic.
I like the single use biodegradable plastic bag for example, where I can have the organic compost inside, so less mess everywhere.
Those should be standard. But currently they are way more expensive. Standard plastic from oil is cheap.
Why not, you know, paper?
And this type of plastic does not. After some months it will, but that is the idea.
Not missed the old plastic straws apart from when at a burger joint that gives you the useless paper ones. The bagasse and PLA straws do not disintegrate as quickly and work as well as the old ones.
Whether they are actually more environmentally friendly is another discussion.
How would you feel if you didn’t have breakfast this morning?
A significant amount of plastic straws and bottle caps actually did up at least in the rivers - a single look at how the Isar in Munich looks after a party summer night is enough evidence - and what enters the Isar, Danube or any other river will eventually end up in the ocean or get stuck in a major lake where it degrades, gets eaten by fish and then ends up in humans when we eat the fish.
Metal bottle caps can at least be fished out by magnets and recycled, but there's no way to capture plastic particles yet.
And that does not take into account all the plastics trash that gets shipped overseas to some piss poor Asian or African country, where it gets sorted, and all the refuse just gets dumped on some landfill where it eventually gets washed into the ocean by rainfall, or it gets incinerated where it creates absurdly toxic combustion products.
Marine uses of plastic (fishing nets, ropes, swimwear, buoys, etc.) seem likely to be impacted first. Along with infrastructure (sump pumps, farm irrigation equipment, ...). Then general outdoor uses.
Figure that these plastic-rotting fungi won't be all that much different from the ones you're familiar with. This is not some SciFi "and the Nanotech Gray Goo ate the entire earth in a week" story.
Not yet.
Perhaps, "Gray Goo" is just another cool-sounding trope, and not a real-world possibility?
This has not happened, not even "humans".
In 100 more years when the only vertebrates that aren't extinct or endangered are humans and our livestock and pets, will that be Grey Goo-like enough for you? Or does it only count if we manage to exterminate the insects and lower-order species too?
Because an "unstoppable apex predator" could never become 100% Grey Goo, as it still needs something to eat!
Grey Goo doesn't consume for energy but for mass; energy needs are plot devices.
I'd argue the majority of human food consumption is for energy not mass so we can't approach the 100% mass of a grey goo event.
However, simply outcompeting organic life using the same atomic building blocks would be a real problem for existing life forms like humans.
So I'm not worried about bacteria learning how to break plastic down in the middle of the ocean getting released into the grocery store one day and in mere hours the entire store is spoiled and destroyed. It would really just become another engineering consideration for materials that already have a lot of such considerations.
How is it ideal to increase the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere even further?
Proper incineration is probably the most reliable, most effective way to deal with human waste.
Well made and managed landfills are also perfectly capable of dealing with human waste, but they are a long term project, and there's a lot of time for a dumb management or politician to decide you don't need to fund it as well and now a hundred years of hard work to protect the environment goes down the drain when your now improperly managed landfill is basically a superfund site.
There's less chance for one idiot to do long term damage with incineration.
100 years later the last organism on the planet dies, suffocating under nanodiamond film...
So convenient to blame the consumer.
What's your microplastic-free alternative to replace most uses of plastic? Microplasticless plastic that would work for all plastic use cases doesn't exist, as far I know.
I agree that getting to zero plastic is probably impossible—-it has amazingly useful properties for some applications—-but it’s also used for convenience and other mundane reasons (e.g., less liability if you offload sterilization to the manufacturer).
First of all we don't need disposable plastic for that… And wrapping it in Kraft paper would work exactly the same way!
What would that kind of legislation look like? It would be bound be huge, have negative non-intended consequences, and loopholes.
Maybe a global plastic tax could function as a guiding force, but even that has the negative consequence increasing the costs of stuff that just doesn't have alternatives. It would funnel money towards developing plastic-free products.
But getting everyone onboard with that is difficult—and I presume it's difficult to put a fair plastic tax for imported products.
This is an argument that comes again and again when discussing government intervention and really baffles me: don't you laissez-faire guys really don't realize that a “loophole” is still much tinier than a completely open door?!
All it really takes to even consider moving into this direction is to propose a solution to this. "Stop plastic" is not it due to practical reasons. I wouldn't know what a proper solution would be, nor would I have the expertice to recognize one when proposed, but is there even a realistic proposal?
Nope. Tetra-Ethyl lead as a fuel additive, primarily for octane boosting, was invented as a "cheaper alternative" to what would normally be used to boost octane: Ethanol. Surely for only coincidental reasons, having a chemical product that they could patent and prevent anyone else from manufacturing made them a whole lot more money than using Ethanol which anyone could make and market and compete.
Leaded gas was a fucking profit motivated thing.
The point of us putting ethanol in gas is multifaceted, but not even remotely about climate change: The octane booster we used after we removed was MTBE. MTBE had a problem where it would constantly leak out of fuel storage and poison families, cause birth defects, you know, toxic shit. So we FINALLY just said fuck it, put ethanol in gas like we should have been doing since the 20s.
Other effects it had: Immediately reduce US gasoline usage by 10%. Subsidy to farmers.
I think many underestimate the influence consumers can have on the manufacturers. In some product categories, they have an option to choose a better alternative. If more did that, the manufacturers in other industries would see that there is a first mover advantage where they can grow their market share by reducing plastic usage. More R&D would be spent finding alternatives and the world as a whole would be improved.
But it all starts with us choosing alternatives whenever possible. If enough consumers do that, the other manufacturers will improve because it impacts their revenue.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/car-tires-and-brake-pads...
https://theconversation.com/how-your-car-sheds-microplastics...
https://microplastics.springeropen.com/track/pdf/10.1186/s43...
Even though consumers don't have a choice when they buy tires today, other products have cleaner alternatives. If I was a manufacturer of tires and saw consumers consistently choosing cleaner products when possible, I would have an incentive to see if I could reduce the pollution, because I would gain market share. The first manufacturer would sell more tires and others would need to follow. Not enough consumers make this choice today to make up the cost of new technologies.
If people were willing to pay more for their tyres then this would be a non issue.
Within the group of consumers, there will always be only a small (if not neglible) fraction that does care and has the means for a boycott.
A bit of organized activism can force regulation and will have a way bigger impact.
Better regulation would force the manufacturers to spend R&D on alternatives and push down the prices so that the rest of the world can also afford a cleaner alternative. Even if that takes time, we would at least have a huge reduction until we have the right tech at an affordable price for the developing world.
The world is a huge place and many countries will never have good regulations due to corruption/lobbyists and continue to pollute. The only way I see regulations would work is if the first world governments, which are the largest consumers, were willing to impose import restrictions, but that would go against the ideology behind the global market. It would also risk retaliation where the affected country could block exports of rare earth minerals and other critical resources.
The US market is one of the largest influencers, and would need to get on board. I'm not an American, but given the political climate in the US right now I doubt they could regulate it effectively.
The same government that makes incentives that added all that extra driving, transportation, storage, packaging, etc to the "natural food" because they think farming and storing livestock within X-feet of a people-zoned area is dangerous and shouldn't be allowed. Next they complain "oh lets fix these food islands that we created in the first place" or "oh please let us regulate these evil companies that use so much bad plastic packaging because we told them not to sell food that "might" be off after expiry so they have to use plastic and other such devices to sell you absolutely pristine and non-contaminated food".
The point in my rambling is that it's such a complicated problem, but the government sits at the heart of it. Both as a cause and a potential solution, unfortunately.
More and more stuff I buy, especially from higher end brands, comes packaged in purely cardboard packaging with no plastic. Not even tape or plastic bits to hold it together. They even brag about this in some of their marketing.
Paper is nice because you can put the packaging in either recycling or compost depending which bin has more space that week.
The only difference such a fungus can make is that it could break down in certain pockets in nature in the long run.
It would be great to see if this fungus can be deployed on land at large enough scale to take care of, say, a whole regions PEs. That way we could get somewhere.
Sure, but only as long as "quite often" means "almost never".
I wonder why they were approved for human consumption?
So now young men are pissed at the world for being not a fairyland like they were promised, and are getting absolutely riled up by grifters who are the first step in the right wing recruitment funnel and now millions of young men think the reason the world sucks is women, immigrants, and having emotions.
Not a great outcome.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/15/recycling-pl...
At what rate does all the plastic in the world start to soften and crumble?
total_plastic = 8.3e9 # total plastic in tons degradation_rate = 0.05 # degradation rate per day in percentage
# Calculation of daily degradation in tons daily_degradation = total_plastic * degradation_rate / 100
# Estimation of time taken to degrade all plastic in days total_days = total_plastic / daily_degradation
# Conversion of total days to years total_years = total_days / 365
# Print the result print(f"It would take approximately {total_years:.2f} years to degrade all the plastic.")
```
It would take approximately 5.48 years to degrade all the plastic.
But +1 on f-string use.
edit: just to make sure that my guess wasn't too far off, I looked up some numbers: we relase about 8 million tons of plastic into the ocean every year. Burning 1 units of plastic produces 3 units of CO2, giving 24 million tons of CO2 if all that plastic were broken down by fungus (or incinerated). We release around 35 billion tons of CO2 every year from burning fossil fuel.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511...
Starting to think it's being over reported because it could be poorly interpted as an excuse to keep producing ocean plastic
Think like a tube worm to solve this problem.
Finding plastic-degrading organisms is urgent.
Is it?
Zero concrete evidence. Lots of vague handwaving and paranoia.
I don't really feel bad about plastics, mostly I feel bad about the egregious stuff -- car tires, fishing gear -- stuff that does not end up in the landfill most of all, because it cannot be segregated from the environment.
Sadly, no bacteria was able to decompose linine. It took a looooot of time (I don't remember how much, but a whole lot). So trees wouldn't decompose when falling down, so they would grow on top of each other, burying the oldest one more and more. And the end, you have wood very deep, under a lot of pressure and I'm a hot environment: it created the petroleum.
So what you're expecting can take millions of year and it would be ironic if petroleum had to be twice in such a cycle.
I forgot to mention my theory, which is that we will be the ones who dig up the plastic to either recycle it or use it for its energy -- it will have been conveniently concentrated in landfills after all :)