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Comment by steve_adams_86 | Hacker News Reader

It seems like 200 years could be an extremely optimistic timeline without major improvements to our technologies used for removing plastic from the environment. At the moment those technologies hardly exist

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Removing plastic from the environment has more to do with keeping it out in the first place. Make sure your county has proper recycling facilities and that the waste processing companies deal with plastic responsibly instead of exporting it abroad or burning it.

Is there such thing as proper plastic recycling today? My understanding is that all current generation plastic recycling is basically a scam, minor pilot projects because it is so energy inefficient that you can't possibly do it at small scale, leave alone at the scale of world-wide plastic use.

Even the Petroleum Institute has admitted that previous generations of "recycling" was a scam, but swears that this time it's real, is my understanding of the situation. In fact, I seem to recall speculation that most of the plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch was "recycled" plastic that had been shipped from the US and Europe to China, then dumped into rivers there and ended up in the Pacific Ocean, because plastic recycling wasn't just a scam, it was actively negative for the environment.

Just to be clear, recycling is good (paper mostly works out, aluminum for sure), but plastic recycling in particular is largely a scam designed to assuage people's guilt at how much plastic they use.

Don't waste water rinsing your recyclables. They'll eventually be floating in it.

Ultimately, the way to do this is to stop using it unless absolutely necessary and use other alternatives. It's like bugs where fixing the problem before the build stage is orders of magnitude easier than trying to fix the problem once it's been released.

We can't remove it from the environment but we can bury it and we can filter it. We may be able to remove it if we can find compounds to bind with it in the soil. Everything else will be going into a landfill and our water will just be tainted forever (because it goes into the ocean and comes down in rain). So start investing in water filtration companies, in addition to the companies that will own all the water rights.

How would you possible bury it if it's distributed throughout the environment and biosphere extremely evenly from the top of Mt. Everest to the bottom of the Mariana's trench to inside your testicles and brain?

Bury everything currently on the surface of the planet and replace it with material from underground?

We can't filter water at the scale necessary. Also, when you bury it, it's going into the water cycle unless you enclose it like a landfill. That's not realistic. It also means the plastic would need to be processed at that landfill to prevent it from eventually entering the water cycle as well (once the landfill is EOL and the lining erodes).

The earth doesn't filter the byproducts out. Burying isn't a solution. It also doesn't address the behemoth scale of plastics already in the environment which will continue to release byproducts into our water.

"Plastic free" environments will likely be cultivated and it will become yet another class divide as it will be prohibitively expensive.

Or a corporate exploit where large businesses lobby for more regulations that small businesses can't afford to comply with.

200 years ago was 1825. a lot happens in 200 years...

Totally, and I hope we care to make this happen. If we cared to, I think we could solve it much faster than 200 years. My doubt is more so about our perceived incentives and will to focus on it. We've solved some insane problems, and while I know virtually nothing about this stuff, my intuition here is that solving plastics problems is likely simpler (chemically and logistically) than, say, sending rockets to space and creating nuclear reactors. I know it's more complicated than it appears on the surface (we have heaps of plastic and its byproducts in a dozen types of forms, in all different biomes, in all stages of decay, and countless byproducts under the same conditions... On a global scale), but other problems we've solved have been multifaceted too.

Maybe what we need is a strong will to solve the problem, no lobbying to prevent the funding of the necessary research or restrictions on creation of plastics, and so on. Similar to how the space race and nuclear programs more or less got all of the money, resources, and agency required to get the job done.

It seems like the reality with plastic is we've become insanely good at making it, but nowhere near as good at dealing with its externalities. We can get better at it.

there are fungi that have evolved to eat plastic with no human intervention. we'll be fine.

There was a recentish David Cronenberg movie about humans evolving to eat plastic so we'll be fine. Can't wait to chow down on plastic.

I have a nice piece of aged nylon from the 1940s, very mature flavours, free range. Goes well with a Chianti red wine pairing.

many organisms are eating plastics, but that is not good for us at all in the short term. A study ? bedford institute? from a while back reported that plastics that they were collecting from the ocean, were full of holes from bieng eaten by something, and if you think about plastic as a widly distrubuted, easily broken down substance with very high intrinsic energy content, that it's no surprise at all that things are eating it. But back to us, thats bad, because all.of those things eating plastic, are then eaten, and passed up the food chain to us, at the top. So what we need to know, is how far advanced the process of filling the food chain with, undesirable for us substances, is, and what the future looks like if we just shrug, or how long will the system take to clear itself out. ie: is the biosphere "saturated" or not. If not, what is the max concentration that we can expect, and when

What if there are negative byproducts of this process though? It's a leap to conclude that we're fine. Consider that we'd be placing a lot of food for fungi into the environment, in places they shouldn't be, which would likely disrupt those environments... And also, the fungi likely can't live in every place the plastic is. Deep sea, deserts, alpine, etc.

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