While it's a great discovery, I'm concerned that this will be abused by plastic manufacturers as an excuse to produce more plastics and talk about "how harmless" plastics are as "they break down organically by fungi" anyway.
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.
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.
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.
So convenient to blame the consumer.
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.
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.
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?
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!
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.
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/15/recycling-pl...