I just wondered how we made these sorts of things when everything on Earth works together and naturally decomposes.
In: 6571
Its comes from the earth but has been modified to give it different properties. So liquid oil is converted into a hard plastic that nothing has seen before. Good analogy is turning your wood house into a steel shed. Termites have never seen steel before and struggle to break it down over time.
Bio degradable plastics focus on making it more useful to life around it. So instead of going from wood to steel, your going from balsa wood to purple heart. It may be different wood buts its still wood and the terminates know how to make use of it even if it takes longer
Uranium-235 also isn’t biodegradable and is found in nature. Just because something comes “from nature” does not mean it is biodegradable. For something to be biodegradable there needs to exist an organism that will eat it, that is what biodegradation is.
Also, plastics are not bad for the planet, the planet couldn’t care less, it is going to be eaten up by the Sun in 5 milliard years anyway. Animals, however, they do care, for one thing microplastics damage them when they enter the organism, or macro plastics can get wrapped around sea life etc etc. It is nothing new for something to be bad for life, there is not a shortage of dangerous things on Earth.
First: You have to understand that not everything **IS** biodegradable. Metal and stone are not. OR they are, but the process can take millions of years.
Second, things are only biodegradable if something else exists that can degrade it. After trees first evolved, they did not rot because no fungi had evolved to eat wood. So they just piled up. That is where coal comes from.
Even though things like oil and coal came from living things, the heat and pressure of being trapped underground for millions of years have converted the chemicals in them into other chemicals, that nothing has yet evolved to digest. Then, we modify that oil and coal even further to make stuff out of
Some bacteria are starting to evolve to digest plastic, but… They can’t keep up. We are taking oil that took millions of years to develop and using it up in just over a hundred years (maybe a couple hundred, if we don’t kill ourselves first). Almost no natural process could keep up with that, even if it already existed.
Because we did things to natural compounds that nature didn’t do to natural compounds, so nature isn’t equipped to deal with it.
Oh it will decompose. In millions of years. The next race will be astounded at the amount of oil from plastic they find in our previous landfills.
It’s technically not bad for the planet and everything decomposes. It’s just not on the timeline that’s human/life friendly. When we say it’s bad for earth what we really mean is it will be harmful to humans and our current way of life.
Same way a bad chef can make something completely inedible out of food.
The incorrect application of chemistry and heat.
The assumption that because something is natural, it must be good and in balance is where things break down. I would argue that is a common misconception in layman environmentalism.
Nature is full of things that come about naturally whilst being devastating for both humans and the eco system.
Volcanic lakes can suddenly release huge amounts of CO2, suffocating (as in lethally) the fauna (incl. humans) in whole areas, as happened at Lake Nyos. Oil deposits can have natural leaks contaminating areas without any human intervention. There are (presumably rare) [naturally occurring nuclear reactors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor#%3A%7E%3Atext%3DA_fossil_natural_nuclear_fission%2Cdaughter_nuclides_of%29_fission_products) in unusually highly concentrated uranium deposits. There are even naturally occurring coal fires. [Mount Wingen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_Mountain), for example, has burned for an estimated 6000 years. (A coal plant would at least have had filters in the chimneys.)
Or for a more controversial example, there are [naturally occurring molds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aflatoxin) infesting crops and releasing carcinogenic toxins into our food. Which is a source of debate with regards to artificial pesticides, as you might imagine.
If anything the thing that sets humans apart is our ability to find something we like and scale it up as much as we can. That has a way of throwing off the balance of anything, organic or not, given the efficacy of human determination. 😅
This in no way should make you feel less urgency about climate change or humans impact on the environment. It should however highlight the problems with associating “natural” with “balanced” or “good for nature”.
During the Carboniferous Period, plants with real wood and bark first appeared. Nothing on the planet at the time could digest them (lignin and suberin) at the time, so they didn’t rot. Huge amounts were buried and formed coal beds. Much of the rest burned in continent-wide wildfires. It took the appearance of fungi to change the process. So this is not the first time an indigestible organic material has showed up.
The earth made trees… which for thousands of years didn’t fully break down as the organisms to break them down didn’t evolve yet. Plastics is just one evolution higher, and there are even discovered bacteria that do consume it.
Latest Answers