I just wondered how we made these sorts of things when everything on Earth works together and naturally decomposes.
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Earth itself doesn’t “decompose”, so why are we to be amazed by the fact that plastic materials are not? Initially the trees didn’t decompose either.
Bacteria and fungi evolved for 60 millions of years before they learned how to “eat” wood (lignin). More exactly between 360 MYA to 300MYA. Maybe even longer… to 200 MYA.
That’s why we have so much coal today.:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal#Formation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal#Formation)
>One theory suggested that about 360 million years ago, some plants evolved the ability to produce lignin, a complex polymer that made their cellulose stems much harder and more woody. The ability to produce lignin led to the evolution of the first trees. But bacteria and fungi did not immediately evolve the ability to decompose lignin, so the wood did not fully decay but became buried under sediment, eventually turning into coal. About 300 million years ago, mushrooms and other fungi developed this ability, ending the main coal-formation period of earth’s history. Although some authors pointed at some evidence of lignin degradation during the Carboniferous, and suggested that climatic and tectonic factors were a more plausible explanation, reconstruction of ancestral enzymes by phylogenetic analysis corrobarated a hypothesis that lignin degrading enzymes appeared in fungi approximately 200 MYa.
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