Maybe the only thing more worrisome than microplastics everywhere is unstoppable plastics eating organisms everywhere, eating through all plastics everywhere.
Usually these bioengineered yeasts need pretty specific growth conditions in order to eat in this case ethylene glycol, not raw finished plastic. In this case they say "plastic-derived substrates" which means they're pre-processing the waste plastic.
Reminds me of the Taumoeba escaping the Xenonite enclosures.
Timescale is the important bit. If organisms degrade plastics in a few hundred years then what plastics are uniquely valuable for will be quite fine indeed.
Perhaps soon you'll be needing to apply stains or sealants to your outdoor plastic items. Maybe even purchase treated plastic products that we worry leach toxic chemicals into their surroundings.
Why is that worrisome? Might give the fish a chance whose bellies are filling up with plastic rubbish
Such as in The Andromeda Strain?
There’s a fantastically silly but fun book about this the name of which eludes me.
Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters, a 1971 British sci-fi environmental disaster novel written by medical scientist Kit Pedler and television screenwriter Gerry Davis.<p>No wikipedia page, but goodreads has it here:<p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/99852816-mutant-59" rel="nofollow">https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/99852816-mutant-59</a>
Not plastic, but 'Cats Cradle' by Kurt Vonnegut has something kind of like that.
there was a time in history before fungus came along and ate trees so there were just a huge amount of trees around that couldn't decay. (which is why we have coal actually) this could be something akin to that.
If you don't eat your biomass compound goo, you can't have any PlastiYum bacterial sludge
Is there any of this ”bacteria converting plastic to fuel/food/neutral stuff“ actually applied anywhere at scale under economically reasonably conditions?
In 2011 researchers identified a fungus named pestalotiopsis microspora. It gained widespread attention because it can digest polyurethane plastic and survive entirely in anaerobic conditions, making it a prime candidate for deployment at the bottom of landfills.<p>I for one look forward to serving this underground deity.
There was a Doomwatch episode on his subject with airliners falling out of the sky bcause all the plastic had been eaten away.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomwatch#Series_One" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomwatch#Series_One</a>
And that episode was stretched out into a novel which I linked to above - <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/99852816-mutant-59" rel="nofollow">https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/99852816-mutant-59</a>
Didn't that happen in Andromeda Strain? The de-polymerized polymer?
Honestly at this point I think the way to go may be to stop using plastics where they're not absolutely required, and to subsequently burn what goes into landfill while producing electricity and reclaiming heat. Better that than this.
And here I thought we were going to be fed insects when we hit final-stage capitalism